Points? Airdrops? Deeper integration with GameFi? Bitcoin ordinals? NFT Launchpad?
Written by: Karen, Foresight News
On November 4, Beijing time, OpenSea released a teaser animation showing a ship setting sail, indicating that the platform will welcome the release of a new version in December. Meanwhile, OpenSea has launched registration for a waiting list, and as of the time of writing, 174,000 people have joined the waiting list.
This news quickly sparked community expectations and speculations regarding token issuance, airdrop activities, reward mechanisms, and L2. According to OpenSea founder and CEO Devin Finzer, "The new version of OpenSea is completely rebuilt because true 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 work for the new version of OpenSea began a year ago.
Regarding the specific features or characteristics of the new version, based on OpenSea's response and the author's analysis, it is speculated that it may include the following highlights:
1. According to a post by Azuki researcher and Mocaverse advisor wale.moca, the new version of OpenSea will have a leaderboard that also provides XP points. OpenSea's official account 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 platform profit sharing. It is worth noting that in August this year, OpenSea received a Wells notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), threatening to sue OpenSea because they believe that the NFTs on the OpenSea platform are securities. In response, OpenSea stated that "in addition to maintaining its position, it also promised to provide $5 million to help cover the legal costs of NFT creators and developers who received Wells notices."
It is worth noting that OpenSea Pro (the NFT marketplace aggregator Gem acquired by OpenSea) previously announced on its official homepage that it would launch a rewards campaign, stating "We are currently scoring and tracking user activity, 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, in April last year, OpenSea Pro released the Gemesis NFT series. As of now, the floor price of this series of NFTs is 0.0139 ETH, which has increased by 242% in the past 24 hours, and the cumulative trading volume displayed on OpenSea has reached 8180 ETH. In this series, the rarity of NFTs is closely related to the time of their first transaction using Gem; the earlier the transaction, the higher the rarity. Therefore, if OpenSea conducts airdrop activities in the future, in addition to OpenSea's trading users, holders of Gemesis NFTs are also very likely to be considered.
2. Release some new features beneficial to artists.
3. Deeper integration with GameFi. This can be seen from OpenSea's recent actions. In late October, OpenSea integrated the Base gaming ecosystem B3 Chain, aiming to improve users' Web3 gaming experience and support faster and cheaper minting of NFT series and in-game items.
4. Achieve account abstraction to make it easier for users and developers to access Web3.
5. According to @DefiIgnas's wish list, 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 application. In response, OpenSea CTO Nadav Hollander stated that this is a nice list and asked @DefiIgnas what their top request is.
Of course, there are also speculations that OpenSea will create a pump.fun version of the NFT market, but this may need to be achieved through the fragmentation of NFTs.
In the current situation where memes are prevalent, the revival of the NFT craze seems to be full of challenges. Especially considering that OpenSea's competitor Blur has performed poorly after issuing 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 seminar during Devcon (on November 13) to unveil the specific details of OpenSea 2.0. Foresight News will continue to follow up.
