OpenSea Launches Seaport Marketplace

Picture this; you’re OpenSea, arguably the biggest NFT marketplace in the world. You’re home to some of the most coveted NFT collections in the industry and one of the first names that pop up when people think of NFTs as a whole. 

After you’ve bought over other projects in the space and survived a phishing attempt, what else is there to do? Well, start a new marketplace, of course!

And this is exactly what OpenSea has done, announcing on May 20, 2022, the launch of its new smart NFT marketplace called Seaport. 

Introducing Seaport

As per the announcement, Seaport is a web3 marketplace protocol for the buying and selling of NFTs that OpenSea hopes to build on along with others. As was made clear in the statement, Seaport is not to be an offshoot of the OpenSea ecosystem. 

“OpenSea does not control or operate the Seaport protocol — we will be just one, among many, building on top of this shared protocol,” the statement says. 

So, how does this new marketplace differ from others? First, it is much more flexible in the way payments for NFTs can be made. Typically, when an NFT is listed for sale, users pay a specific amount for it in cryptocurrency. 

The most common of these is  ETH, ERC20, ERC721, or ERC1155. Usually, only one of these tokens is offered for a sale but Seaport will reportedly allow users to buy NFTs using a combination of different tokens as opposed to just one. 

Users can also create ‘mirrors’ of existing listings and then offer these in return for the original item, provided that certain criteria are met. Some have taken this to mean that NFTs can be exchanged for each other, which has caused a bit of a stir on social media.

Seaport also allows the fulfilment of multiple orders in one go through that is called a set of fulfillments. 

“Each fulfillment corresponds to a single item transfer and indicates a group of offer items that the submitter can match with corresponding consideration items. As long as each consideration item on each listing is fully credited after all fulfillments have been applied, the offerers can leverage their coincidence of wants and complete their transfers,” the announcement explains. 

Finally, tipping from one user to the other is allowed as long as the tip amount doesn’t exceed the original listing price of the NFT.

A New NFT Market

Within the announcement, OpenSea made it clear that this new marketplace is open source and that no person or organization, including them, should have a sole claim to it. Instead, the plan is for Seaport to be developed by the community. 

This includes developers creating new use cases, security breaches being reported, and the community pushing its adoption. Overall, this is a clear deviation from the typical NFT marketplace format but one that OpenSea clearly believes in. 

Along with the launch of this marketplace, OpenSea has also announced a two-week audit contest with code4rena that features a prize pool of $1 million.