Three years after the NFT craze peaked with billions of dollars in monthly trading volume and the Bored Ape Yacht Club appearing on (The Tonight Show), collectible tokens are all the rage again, and so is the popular NFT marketplace OpenSea.
NFT trading volume recently hit a three-month high, and speculation about a potential OpenSea token is heating up after market competitor Magic Eden completed its own ME airdrop.
The market may or may not have poked fun at this, recently asking X (formerly Twitter) followers “How long have you been using OpenSea?” Many traders saw this as a playful gesture of user loyalty, which is often a key metric for platforms determining token airdrop allocations.
The company’s biggest competitors, Blur and Magic Eden, have both completed airdrops to their respective users, with the latter airdropping more than $700 million to its users a week ago. OpenSea once led the NFT world after raising funds at a valuation of $13.3 billion in 2022, but has since fallen sharply as new challengers have arrived.
Here’s what we know about the possibility of an OpenSea token and the speculation surrounding it.
OpenSea Foundation established
The biggest speculation regarding an OpenSea token airdrop comes from a recent application filed in the Cayman Islands for an “OpenSea Foundation.”
The document immediately attracted interest from cryptocurrency players, most notably a post from pseudonymous crypto celebrity Wale.Swoosh, which garnered more than 1.4 million views on X.
Crypto organizations often create a foundation as a separate entity from their more established, consumer-facing brands, and historically these foundations then serve as the organizing body for communicating and facilitating token airdrops.
While registering a foundation does not guarantee that tokens will follow, other organizations that have recently airdropped tokens to users have done so through their respective foundations.
Recent examples include Magic Eden’s ME Foundation or Ethereum layer 2 network Movement Network Foundation.
An OpenSea spokesperson confirmed to Decrypt that the foundation is indeed a registered entity, but did not comment further on any association with OpenSea.
The connection became clearer on December 20 when an account named X using the OpenSea Foundation name posted “ocean entered the chat,” possibly hinting at the imminent launch of the OCEAN token.
The account, created in May 2024, follows only one account on the platform - OpenSea. Both OpenSea and its CEO Devin Finzer interacted with the post through their respective accounts.
While details remain scarce, a spokesperson for the OpenSea Foundation told Decrypt: "More information is coming soon."
OpenSea 2.0 Preview
While many NFT traders have been urging OpenSea to launch a token over the past few years, speculation surrounding a potential token reached a fever pitch in November.
At the time, OpenSea opened a waitlist for a completely reimagined marketplace, dubbed OpenSea 2.0, after the once-top NFT platform reduced the size of its team to become more nimble and rethink its model.
OpenSea CEO and co-founder Devin Finzer wrote in a post on X: "We've been working quietly at OpenSea. To truly innovate, sometimes you have to step back and reimagine everything."
Soon after the waitlist opened, early beta users of OpenSea 2.0 began sharing snippets of new features, which only fueled token speculation.
In a post that has garnered more than 360,000 views, an anonymous beta tester named john.weth showed off leaderboards and points farming activity, hinting that retroactive rewards are coming — though “how and what measures” remain to be determined.
OpenSea 2.0 was previously expected to launch sometime in December, but no updates have been provided yet, and its waitlist has amassed more than a million wallets so far.
Traders bet
While details about the token launch remain unclear, cryptocurrency bettors are seeing an increasing likelihood of an OpenSea airdrop, according to prediction markets on Polymarket.
For example, the odds of an OpenSea token being released before 2024 have now risen to nearly 60%, up 40% last week. On the morning of December 20, the odds had fallen to 20%, but rose sharply after the OpenSea Foundation account posted a message on X.
Airdrop odds for other prediction markets available on Polymarket also increased.
A market that allows users to bet on an OpenSea token airdrop before April 2025 is currently trading at 82%, with just $50,000 staked so far.
As for whether the token will succeed? More than $2 million has been staked on Polymarket on whether the OpenSea token will trade at a fully diluted valuation of more than $1 billion a week after launch.
Expectations for the token launch fell 5% last week, with traders pricing in a 56% chance of a launch, and expectations for a 50-50 launch if the tokens don’t launch by Dec. 31, a scenario that seems increasingly unlikely.
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