CoinEx｜OpenSea: The Monopolistic NFT Leader You Have to Know About
How should we pick a cryptocurrency with a high safety margin? A proven strategy is to select the leading projects. Although the growth rate of leaders in different segments also differs, most of the trending leaders, such as Bitcoin as a store of value, Ethereum as an infrastructure platform, Binance (BNB) as the leading exchange-based native token, etc., have demonstrated a brilliant track record. In particular, some have registered hundredfold, thousandfold, or even millionfold price growth. What about the leading project in the extremely popular NFT segment? The answer is OpenSea, which you must know about. This is the case not only because it is an absolute segment leader but also because the project has not issued a token yet. By making early plans, you may make a fortune through the OpenSea airdrops.
What is OpenSea?
As the world’s largest decentralized marketplace for NFTs, OpenSea is the NFT equivalent of Uniswap. Founded in February 2017, it is a company incubated by Y Combinator. Until 2020, OpenSea had remained a small business, and its initial focus was not even to become an NFT marketplace. It didn’t switch its focus to the NFT market until CryptoKitties went viral. Following this repositioning, OpenSea remained a noteless project and started to stand out during the NFT boom in the latter half of 2020.
Why is OpenSea the monopolistic NFT leader? Let us look at the following data, covering OpenSea and some of its well-known peers: SuperRare, Rarible, Foundation, Nity Gateway, and MakersPlace.
Take the turnover of the last two months:
In August and September, the total NFT trading volume of the seven marketplaces stood at approximately $3.5 billion and $3.08 billion. However, OpenSea alone contributed an excess of $3.4 billion (August) and $3 billion (September), with a market share of over 97%. It is even more monopolistic than the search engine giant Google (Google owns 92% of the search market). In terms of the number of users, OpenSea also boasts an overwhelming advantage. In September, OpenSea had 281,000 active users, while its peers only had much fewer active users, ranging from a few thousand to only a few hundred.
Based on the above data, we can tell that, although its peers made little revenue, OpenSea’s revenue in August and September has surpassed that of the DEX leader — Uniswap.
That said, how did OpenSea build such a monopoly? The answer lies in its many advantages:
1) Low service fee
OpenSea only charges vendors a service fee of 2.5%. Although such a rate is much higher than what crypto exchanges charge, compared with the 15% to 30% service fees charged by traditional auction houses (such as Sotheby’s) and other NFT marketplaces, the fees on OpenSea are extremely low.
2) Low threshold
OpenSea sets no threshold for artists and NFTs, nor does it review the NFTs. Additionally, on OpenSea, you don’t need to spend Gas fees on creating NFTs. The only time you need to pay fees on the blockchain is when you sell NFTs. As such, after the NFT boom, the number of NFT collectibles on OpenSea has soared. As of October 22, more than 20 million NFTs have been sold on OpenSea.
3) Decentralized network storage
As a decentralized NFT marketplace, OpenSea ensures the persistence and immutability of data. However, we should also bear in mind that: For trading platforms, it is extremely challenging to bring all the NFT assets and content onto the Ethereum blockchain, which involves high service fees and great technical difficulties. As such, OpenSea uses offline storage to mint NFT tokens with hash documents, which ensures the security (immutability) of data and achieves the massive storage of NFT assets and content.
4) One-stop NFT trade services covering multiple chains, NFT types, and projects
OpenSea boasts a large number of NFTs in a great variety, covering such fields as painting, music, domain names, virtual worlds, games, sports star cards, and utilities. On OpenSea, you can almost find any type of NFT you want to buy or see, which significantly concentrates both buyers and sellers. Apart from this, OpenSea also supports multi-chain transactions, meaning that if users find the Ethereum fee expensive, they can also trade on Polygon, with minimal Gas fees. With such a one-stop NFT trade service, the market’s love for OpenSea is completely justified.
In light of this promising project that is comparable to Uniswap, which has a market cap of $15.9 billion (ranking 12th among all cryptocurrencies), what moves should we make to profit from OpenSea?
The most definite answer is airdrops.
At the moment, smart crypto users are already buying and selling NFTs on OpenSea to create more transaction records with the hope to get the leading player’s airdrops, which are surely targeted by many. Therefore, its airdrops will definitely require a contribution to OpenSea’s revenue. Perhaps that explains the surge in the trading volume on OpenSea. Of course, you will face greater uncertainties in investments of a specific NFT collectible. Hence, we do not recommend newcomers buying NFTs in bulk just to create more trade records for airdrops.
