OpenSea / 23 posts found
Acquisitions Are Increasing in the NFT Ecosystem
Despite falling victim to several high-profile hacks earlier this year, OpenSea has continued to be the preeminent NFT marketplace on the world wide web. Their acquisition of Gem, the leading NFT marketplace aggregator, is just the latest in a series of aggressive moves. In their official press statement, OpenSea expressed hope that the acquisition would “allow [them] to learn from Gem’s expertise and intuition about the advanced NFT community – and bring the best of Gem’s features to OpenSea.” Most notably, Gem enables users to easily purchase NFTs from a wide range of marketplaces in a single transaction. Should OpenSea […]
NFT Marketplaces Are Centralized, and It’s a Real Problem
Minting often happens on an NFT community’s webpage. However, many projects direct members to NFT marketplaces for secondary sales, which happen almost exclusively on marketplaces like OpenSea. There’s nothing stopping NFT communities (or users) from being de-platformed by these major NFT marketplaces. While the blockchain is decentralized, Opensea, Coinbase, and Metamask — for example — are highly centralized. Cryptopunks, Meebits, and Solana Monkey Business are some of the few projects that host their own marketplaces, but Opensea is still the largest and most popular NFT marketplace — it’s recorded $22.73 billion in NFT sales thanks to its 1.3 million buyers. […]