“It only makes sense” for assets like collectible trading cards to be tokenized and traded onchain, OpenSea Chief Marketing Officer Adam Hollander said during an interview with The Block’s Gareth Jenkinson at Consensus Miami.
Hollander argued that NFTs remain a valid technology to prove ownership of digital and physical assets, despite the crash in the values of profile photo collections such as Bored Apes and CryptoPunks.
“I think we’ll see a resurgence,” Hollander said. “But I think if we do that, it might look a little bit different than what people saw in 2021 and 2022.”
According to Hollander the previous one $NFT The boom was swamped by speculative traders, blinded by rapid jumps in dollar value rather than focusing on the underlying technology.
“A lot of people who bought NFTs didn’t buy them because they actually wanted them,” Hollander said. “They treated NFTs more like a digital casino than with respect for what they actually represent.”
Hollander sees future adoption driven by tokenized collectibles such as Pokémon cards and Rolex watches, digital tickets, gaming items and AI tools. He also suggested that more recent developments in artificial intelligence could accelerate $NFT adoption by lowering the barrier to creating digital art, animation, games and other online assets.
“It’s becoming easier for just about anyone to create great things,” Hollander said.
OpenSea extension
OpenSea’s goal now, he said, is to create a platform where users can manage all their crypto assets, NFTs and collectibles across multiple wallets and chains.
“I want all my assets, all my wallets, all my blockchains, all in one place,” Hollander said.
He added that OpenSea is focused on simplifying user onboarding, adding Apple Pay-like fiat payments, and displaying tokenized assets in dollars instead of crypto prices.
“People don’t expect that item to cost $0.00 in Ethereum when they want to buy their $20 Pokémon card,” Hollander said. “We need to be able to meet people where they are.”
Hollander also addressed the proverbial elephant in the room: OpenSea’s delayed launch of SEA tokens. He said those decisions ultimately rest with the OpenSea Foundation and that he personally had no further insight into the timeline.
“If a token is launched and it’s nothing more than a memecoin that needs to be launched, dropped and forgotten, then it doesn’t really provide value to anyone,” Hollander said.