June 16, 2022
By Sharan Kaur Phillora
OpenSea has moved to the “Seaport Protocol,” a new smart contract that the NFT marketplace says will allow its 1.8 million users to save money on Ethereum gas fees.
Here’s what we know:
With the Seaport contract, users will be able to save roughly 35% on gas, the company said. And new accounts will no longer require that one-time “setup fee” OpenSea previously charged. “We estimate the new contract will save [over] $460 million in total fees each year,” OpenSea wrote in a Twitter thread detailing the Seaport announcement.
Today, we're officially moving to the Seaport protocol!
We estimate the new contract will save $460m + in total fees each year. But, that’s not all 👀 Let’s go through the updates… https://t.co/89B1FJARnl
— OpenSea (@opensea) June 14, 2022
Seaport is an open-source project OpenSea announced last month, and the company says it’s significantly more efficient than its old system when it comes to dealing with the blockchain. The fees that are being eliminated or reduced are called gas fees, which OpenSea neither controls nor profits from. Instead, they’re a cost of an activity on blockchains like Ethereum or Polygon.
OpenSea also promises the migration will bring new features alongside the reduced fees. Buyers will now be able to make offers on an entire collection of NFTs, and the marketplace will have something called “trait offers” that lets you bid for every NFT in a collection with a certain attribute. OpenSea says that this will only be available for “the top 100 collections” that use static attributes for now.
The company hopes that the upgrade to Seaport will let it introduce other features at a faster pace. The big question now is whether the new features it comes up with or the lower fees will be enough to drum up more interest in NFTs
About the author
Sharan Kaur Phillora’s thirst for knowledge has led her to study many different subjects, including NFTs and Blockchain technology – two emerging technologies that will change how we interact with each other in the future. When she isn’t exploring a new idea or concept, she enjoys reading literary masterpieces.
