Original author: Karen, Foresight News
On November 4, Beijing time, OpenSea released a preview animation, in which a ship is setting sail, indicating that the platform will soon usher in a new version of the release in December. At the same time, OpenSea launched the registration of the waiting list. As of the time of writing, 174,000 people have joined the waiting list.
This news quickly triggered the community's expectations and speculations about token issuance, airdrop activities, reward mechanisms, and L2. According to Devin Finzer, founder and CEO of OpenSea, "The new version of OpenSea is completely rebuilt, because real innovation sometimes requires us to take a step back and rethink and redesign the entire framework." OpenSea Pro co-founder vasa also revealed that the development of the new version of OpenSea began a year ago.
Regarding the specific features or characteristics of the new version, based on OpenSea's responses and the author's analysis, it is speculated that it may include several major highlights:
1. According to a post by Azuki researcher and Mocaverse advisor wale.moca, the new version of OpenSea will feature a leaderboard, which will also provide XP points. OpenSea officially retweeted this.
Based on this, it is speculated that the new version is likely to launch a points program. Considering that OpenSea is an American company, the rewards may not necessarily be OpenSea tokens, but could also include profit sharing from the platform. Notably, in August this year, OpenSea received a Wells notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which threatened to sue OpenSea because they believe the NFTs on the OpenSea platform are securities. In response, OpenSea stated, 'In addition to standing by its position, it also promised to provide $5 million to help cover the legal fees of NFT creators and developers who received Wells notices.'
It is worth mentioning that OpenSea Pro (the NFT marketplace aggregator Gem acquired by OpenSea) had previously announced on its official homepage that it would launch a rewards program, claiming 'we are currently scoring and tracking user activities, the game is about to begin.' However, this content has now been removed from the official website.
In addition, to commemorate the launch of OpenSea Pro, OpenSea Pro released the Gemesis NFT series last April. As of now, the floor price of this series of NFTs is 0.0139 ETH, having increased by 242% in the past 24 hours, with a total trading volume of 8180 ETH displayed on OpenSea. In this series, the rarity of NFTs is closely related to the time they were first traded using Gem; the earlier the trade, the higher the rarity. Therefore, if OpenSea conducts an airdrop in the future, holders of Gemesis NFTs are very likely to be considered, in addition to OpenSea's trading users.
2. Release new features beneficial to artists.
3. Deeper integration of GameFi. This can be seen from OpenSea's recent initiative, in late October, OpenSea integrated the Base gaming ecosystem B 3 Chain, aiming to improve users' Web3 gaming experience, supporting faster and cheaper minting of NFT collections and in-game items.
4. Implement account abstraction, allowing users and developers to more easily access Web3.
5. According to @DefiIgnas's wishlist, it is hoped that OpenSea 2.0 will support Bitcoin ordinals, rune rewards, simplify onboarding, portfolio pages, token airdrops, as well as fragmented NFTs, NFT Launchpad, social features (for NFTs like Instagram), and a native mobile app. In response, OpenSea CTO Nadav Hollander stated that this is a nice list and asked @DefiIgnas about their top priorities.
Of course, there are speculations that OpenSea might create a pump.fun version of the NFT marketplace, although this may require the fragmentation of NFTs.
In the current prevalence of memes, the revival of the NFT craze seems full of challenges. Especially considering that OpenSea's competitor Blur has performed poorly after issuing its tokens, and Magic Eden is about to issue tokens, whether OpenSea 2.0 can reignite the NFT craze remains to be seen.
It is worth mentioning that OpenSea team member @ken_cadima will hold a technical lecture during Devcon (November 13) to reveal the details of OpenSea 2.0. Foresight News will continue to pay attention.
