OpenSea Adds Support for Avalanche

In the last few months, OpenSea has seemingly been on a mission to make itself much more accessible to users of all sorts of blockchains and easier to use overall. This has included adding support for Arbitum and creating new in-house features such as bulk listing and buying. 

Now, only a few weeks after this development, OpenSea has done it again by announcing support for the Avalanche network, a layer-1 Proof-of-Stake blockchain. This means that NFT assets minted on this blockchain will soon be available on OpenSea. All this was made public through an interview with Shiva Rajaraman, the VP of product at OpenSea. 

OpenSea and Avalanche 

In the interview, Rajaraman explained that the company is moving towards a future where people all over the internet can use OpenSea regardless of their preferred chain. 

“The future of web3 is multichain; and it’s always been our goal to offer the best selection and connect people with projects and creators across the chains they prefer,” he said. 

There are also several benefits to the Avalanche network such as its very low fees and high transaction speeds. And as John Wu, president of Ava Labs, said in the interview with TechCrunch, there was a demand for OpenSea access within the Avalanch community as well. There are also some unnamed companies that are working on projects with Avalanche that wanted OpenSea access to be enabled as well. 

“They want to know there is a chain that’s scalable, because [Web 2.0] is so much bigger than web3. They want a chain that can handle massive amounts of activity from its users. These brands are far more comfortable working with OpenSea,” Wu said. 

With this development, OpenSea now supports 7 different blockchains and from all indications, plans to add even more into the mix moving forward. Ultimately. the marketplace seems to be working towards its future of supporting many different blockchains and if increased support of these networks continues, OpenSea could support dozens of them eventually. 

This is also a timely development given that the crypto industry is currently experiencing a winter that has inevitably affected NFTs as well. To get through this winter, it would benefit a platform like OpenSea to support as many networks and attract even more users and collections. 

It also comes at a time when OpenSea is experiencing some shakeups in its leadership.  Just this week, its now-former Chief Financial Officer Brian Roberts, resigned shortly after Ryan Foutty, the former vice president of business development of OpenSea, also resigned. It seems that this is a period of changes at OpenSea as a whole. 

An Open Web3 Space

It is quite interesting that OpenSea’s management repeatedly mentions the desire to strive for a web3 future that is specifically multi-chain. As many of us know, one of the biggest philosophies of web3 is open access for users. For a platform like OpenSea to achieve this, users cannot be shut out because of the blockchain network they prefer and this seems to be the motivation behind these developments.