OpenSea Pro: The NFT giant’s answer to fading?

OpenSea has been stuck between a rock and a hard place for the past six months. At that time, its first real competitor – Blur, the NFT marketplace and aggregator – broke onto the scene, taking over most of the trading volume of the once untouchable ruler of the NFT seas.

The development caused a stir in the NFT community in more ways than one; renewed discussions about maker fees (royalties) have emerged, complaints about market manipulation by power traders abound, and questions about how web2 wants the NFT community to suddenly make Web3 big in the collective consciousness.

OpenSea itself has finally responded to Blur’s incursion into its formerly occupied territory with its own pro-merchant-focused marketplace: OpenSea Pro (OS Pro). It’s a major development that touches on several hot button issues in the space, so we’ve broken down the basics for you. Here’s what you need to know about OpenSea Pro’s origins and features, how it plans to attract and retain user loyalty, and what its entry into the scene could mean for NFTs in the future.

What is OpenSea Pro?

OpenSea Pro is OpenSea’s merchant-focused marketplace and aggregator. Compared to OpenSea, which is intended to appeal to retail buyers (i.e. casual NFT enthusiasts or people who don’t want to buy or trade NFTs on a large scale), OS Pro is built to make high volume trading easy and attractive to its users.

It’s advertised as a platform with zero percent marketplace fees (compared to OpenSea’s 2.5 percent fee) that will command creator royalties of at least 0.5 percent. However, the zero percent marketplace fee is provisional only and reverts to the original standard fee of 2.5% at the end of the promotional period.

The platform is actually a rebrand of Gem, an aggregator it acquired in early 2022. OpenSea did this as part of a response to an influx of activity by notable NFT collectors. A year later, on April 4, 2023, OpenSea announced Gem v2, reinventing itself as the aggregator as OpenSea Pro.

Features and functionality

The new platform comes with a number of features for its users. OpenSea Pro collects offers from 170 marketplaces, displays live information on various markets, features advanced ordering and listing options, comes with mobile compatibility and live project coin tracking, and more. While viewing a particular collection, users can filter for items they own in that collection and then list, sell, or transfer them from there.

The layout and design of the platform is also easy on the eyes, making Blur’s analogue aesthetic look a little mechanistic and cold by comparison. It’s easy to navigate and pretty intuitive – nothing feels like it’s hiding or hard to find. The overall feel maintains OpenSea’s Apple-esque aesthetic, but gives the impression of a platform much more capable of higher-octane trading.

Rewards for users

One of the main questions on the minds of the NFT community is how OS Pro will drive user activity and drive loyalty. The obvious comparison remains that of Blur and how that marketplace’s team attracts traders with staggered airdrops of its own token, $BLUR. It’s easy to find calls for OS Pro to introduce its own token under just about every tweet the platform puts out, but no plans have been announced so far.

Driving loyalty through token rewards is fraught with risk and poses some serious sustainability issues. OpenSea Pro is still in its infancy, and the developers and team may be waiting for more of Blur’s strategy before simply following in its footsteps. However, the platform has made it clear that it intends to reward its users with NFTs and other benefits.

“We’re not forgetting the community rewards,” OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer wrote in a company blog post announcing the launch of OS Pro. ‘Have your binoculars ready! We are taking a different course by offering NFTs as rewards.”

One of the current benefits is an NFT being broadcast to early users of OS Pro, when it was still called Gem. The token, called the Gemesis NFT, is a gem-like digital stone awarded to users who used the platform before March 31, 2023. On April 19, the rarity features of the NFTs were revealed, with rarer properties going to previous Gem users who bought an NFT on the aggregator. While there is much speculation as to whether these NFTs will have any future use, OpenSea has yet to make any official reference to them.

Growing pains

The launch of OpenSea Pro met with mixed feelings from the NFT community. Some have praised the platform for introducing another option for large-scale traders and collectors, while others have pointed out discrepancies in what the company has communicated to its users and the experience they have using the marketplace.

For example, observers have observed that OS Pro’s claim to include zero percent marketplace fees may not be as advertised.

In response, OpenSea Pro has clarified its stance on these two matters, claiming that the royalty threshold for creators is now maintained at 0.5 percent and that they deleting the marketplace fee of 2.5 percent. OS Pro developer Vasa has written on Twitter that the problem stems from offers coming from OpenSea (as opposed to OS Pro).

OpenSea’s official charges page also states that, to protect users from inorganic volume, a 0.5 percent marketplace fee will be set for listing and listings originating from OS Pro if specific conditions are met. As for royalties, if a listing is made on OS Pro for a collection that doesn’t have an on-chain royalty enforcement method, the minimum amount for creator fees is set at 0.5 percent.

Does OpenSea Pro work?

While it’s too early to say whether OS Pro will really give Blur and other competitors a real bang for their buck, the platform has had some smaller successes that it likely finds encouraging. First, the fact that while Blur still dominates the NFT market in terms of pure trading volume, the gap between the two has narrowed steadily since February. However, with NFT volumes down across the board in recent weeks and Blur’s customer retention strategy showing signs of weakness, there’s no way to attribute this directly to anything OpenSea has done.

The more tangible thing OS Pro seems to have done is Catching up with Blur in terms of the number of daily transactions since launch. The pro-trader demographic isn’t huge; most of the activity on Blur comes from just a few dozen wallets, market makers with deep pockets that have an inordinate influence over the collections they trade with.

The appearance of another marketplace to do business with, coupled with the tempting potential to be rewarded with airdrops from NFTs or even a potential token, could be enough incentive to draw users away from Blur for now. It is also important to note that a metric like number of transactions is second only to volume for platforms.

Much of the dynamics of the NFT market now hinges on how OpenSea decides to juggle its influence on two platforms and how it will avoid appearing stale to the traders and collectors it is trying to court and retain. Ironically, the cracks in Blur’s controversial loyalty strategy could ultimately be a lesson OpenSea benefits from, though the company hasn’t yet hinted at how it will improve on current token-boosted models (or even if it wants to move in that direction). .

NFT Marketplaces: Reshaping the Landscape

The NFT ecosystem is bracing for May 1, the date Blur ends its colons reward system for users. This development could have significant implications for the wider NFT community, and as such all eyes are on the two platforms. What happens next is a mystery.

Due to Blur’s impact on the market since its arrival last October, it is widely accepted that the NFT space has ample room to accommodate both retail and pro-NFT buyers. At the same time, Web3 enthusiasts don’t want NFT projects and the health of the overall market to be too intrinsically linked to pro-trader activities – market makers who can wipe out rock bottom prices while tripping over themselves to chase tokens designed to monetize their loyalty.

And, as always, creator royalties are at stake. Creatives are less than thrilled that 0.5 percent is now the new default base fee for collections on platforms like OpenSea that don’t use on-chain enforcement tools. But this is all part of the NFT landscape resetting after being hit by the comet that was Blur last fall; more time is needed to see if creatives will take advantage of the trend to create their own marketplaces to avoid dealing with organizations that disrespect the creatives who built the space.

Despite the excitement in the air, it’s a dynamic time to be a part of Web3. By the end of the year, the landscape can be completely unrecognizable.

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