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In the wake of Pump’s success, OpenSea is transforming from an innovative NFT marketplace to a token trading aggregator supporting 22 blockchains.
OpenSea has gained more than $25 million in token trading revenue and about $5.6 million in NFT trading revenue in the past month, marking a sudden uptick in activity after what had otherwise been a slow year for the platform.
“There is a huge opportunity in the app layer for a company to focus on building an experience that combines the best of what a centralized exchange experience has to offer in terms of Web2-type usability, and [what] DEXs have to offer,” OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer told me in an interview. “No one has really done that.”
OpenSea’s own data on Dune shows that the market has generated approximately $45.8 million in revenue so far this year. That means the last month alone makes up over 66% of annual revenue, which is a staggering statistic.
It saw 202% month-over-month revenue growth, with over $520 million in 30-day NFT volume and $3 billion in 30-day token volume.
What gives? Well, the OpenSea Foundation – which OpenSea has been very silent about – is gearing up to launch the SEA token sometime in the first quarter of next year. OpenSea has repeatedly emphasized that the foundation is separate from the company, but has largely evaded my requests for more information. In February, the company told me that no OpenSea board members or staff work at the foundation, and that OpenSea’s legal team did not set up the foundation, but OpenSea has not yet shared who actually runs the foundation.
On its platform, OpenSea incentivizes traders with a rewards pool of NFTs and tokens distributed through “treasuries.” Traders also buy and sell various assets in the hope that they will make a big payday when the token finally launches.
So the farmers are busy.
We also now know that half of the token supply will be allocated to ‘the community’, suggesting that there may be a lot of SEA up for grabs for power traders.
This highly anticipated token, plus other types of rewards including several NFTs, is likely what drives traders and farmers back to the platform.
OpenSea had over 73% of the Ethereum NFT trading market share last week, while Blur came in second with over 22%.
“We don’t even consider Blur as a primary competitor these days,” Finzer says. “We have expanded our vision to include trading everything.”
OpenSea will also build on that vision of becoming a one-stop shop for crypto traders by adding perps trading, which Finzer confirmed in his post last week.
The marketplace is revamping its mobile app to further compete in the trading app space, and is looking at more ways to simplify the user experience even further by removing existing bottlenecks (one of my personal complaints that will hopefully be resolved is that wETH is still required to make offers on OpenSea). The mobile app rework is currently in closed alpha.
“There’s ETH on Solana, there’s ETH on all these different chains,” Finzer said during our conversation. “For a user, they just want to understand it as a single ticker. They just want to be able to buy and sell ETH wherever it is, wherever the best liquidity is. And so we’re even going to abstract That low away from people so that [they] can actually use this in a way that feels natural to them, without having to worry about the different chains.”
“If you want to know under the hood, we also offer that functionality to people who are more advanced, but the point is, we don’t have to. And so I think this is really the next layer of abstraction for really great consumer apps,” he continued.
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The marketplace is handing out more than $12.2 million in NFT and token rewards to traders who used the platform in the first wave of the gamified engagement campaign that has been underway for much of the year.
However, some traders on OpenSea’s Discord server are concerned that they may have to use KYC or reveal their locations and government IDs to claim rewards. Some seem concerned that they might spend money to maximize their rewards, only to receive a reward that they may not even be allowed to claim in the end.