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Amidst the bear market and increasing competition from marketplaces like Blur offering zero trading fees, one of the leading NFT marketplaces, OpenSea, saw a massive decline in NFT trading volume, with only $105 million recorded as of June’23, in contrast to the $600 million reported in June of the previous year. Consequently, OpenSea’s ranking has dropped to Number 2 after Blur. However, the platform has been actively trying to restore its position by launching and updating new features.
On July 20, OpenSea announced this new feature where users can make deals on the platform itself through a Twitter post. Let’s learn more about this feature and explore the community’s response.
What are Open Sea Deals?
Open Sea Deals allows users to exchange NFTs with each other and include some WETH as a part of the offer. Currently, the users will only have to bear the gas fees, and no additional platform fees or royalties are involved with these transactions. Also, there is a limit of up to 30 NFTs that can be included as part of a deal. The NFTs on both sides of the deal must be on the same chain and from badged (verified) collections.
Benefits
- Trustworthy: These deals will allow users to trade NFTs with each other without messaging on DMs and make the overall process of NFT Swapping trustworthy. It will protect victims from dealing with fraudulent users.
- User Friendly: It offers users to deal in a combination of NFTs and gives an option to add WETH. This helps users make a fair deal and engage with collectors directly. Overall, the process is straightforwardly explained below in detail.
- Powered by Seaport: Through Seaport, the NFT exchange process can be made gas efficient.
Process of Making a Deal on Open Sea
First, you only require the wallet address, ENS name, or OpenSea username of the individual you wish to transact with. Here’s a short video to help you through the steps.
- Hover over the profile icon and click on ‘Make a Deal.’
- Provide the username, ENS name, or wallet address of the person you wish to initiate a deal.
- Explore their eligible items and choose the item or items you want to receive in the deal. (you can select up to 30 items).
- Click Next.
- Browse your collected items and pick the item or items you wish to propose sending in the deal.
- Include the amount of WETH you intend to transfer as part of the deal. (OPTIONAL)
- Click Next.
- Re-check your proposed deal and click on ‘Send Deal.’ You might be prompted to approve the collection before signing the transaction.
You will receive a confirmation message once the deal has been sent, and you can view all your deals on the Deals tab in your profile. Though the platform offers an option to cancel the proposed deal, it requires the user to pay the gas fees.
Community Feedback
The community’s response could have been more positive, and the announcement received substantial backlash across their channels. Many users considered it a standard feature on other platforms like F3.exchange, Yaw, and God Hates NFTs, dismissing it as a mere copy-paste move. Another one has called it one of the worst moves of Open Sea and criticized all of its new features, including NFT Trading, disabling royalties, and launching Open Sea Pro.
Despite this feedback, there are yet many users who were optimistic about it and instead called it a SAFE platform to trade NFTs and prevent P2P scams.
Conclusion
The success of OpenSea’s new features will only be evident with time. Nevertheless, the platform is encountering growing competition from other NFT marketplaces. To maintain its position as the leading NFT marketplace, OpenSea must take further steps to address the concerns of its users and do more to promote NFTs created by independent artists and protect their rights.
