opensea nft

OpenSea is a decentralized non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace for buying, selling, and trading NFTs. In fact, OpenSea brands itself as the biggest marketplace for digital goods. As such, it’s worth taking a closer look at OpenSea and what the platform adds to trading NFTs. Moreover, this article explains how to use OpenSea, as well as what NFTs are. The difference between fungible tokens and NFTs is that they have unique characteristics and identifiers and are not interchangeable. Another way to think of them is that NFTs represent things, not currencies. opensea The first decentralized NFT marketplace was OpenSea, founded in January 2018. So, you can see how new NFT marketplaces are. Founders Alex Atallah and Devin Finzer decided the ecosystem was ready for an NFT marketplace after seeing CryptoKitties in action. Since then, OpenSea has experienced significant growth, as have NFTs in general. Some big-name players like Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Chamath Palihapitiya have recently expressed interest in the space. Furthermore, Logan Paul even announced the launch of his first NFT on Twitter, which went on to net him over $3.5 million. NFTs and Digital Art opensea It’s an understatement that NFTs can potentially have a huge significance for digital art. According to CryptoArt.io, NFT-based crypto art alone has a total value surpassing $100 million. On the other hand, NonFungible.com estimates NFT’s crypto art sector to only account for 25% of the NFT market, making it $62.5 million. Either way, there are lots more use cases for NFTs than just digital art. But before we start digging into the OpenSea marketplace, if you’re still unsure about NFTs, you can read our article, “Non-Fungible Tokens – Could NFTs Supercharge The DeFi Sector?” Or better yet, enroll at Ivan on Tech Academy and take the Crypto for Beginners Course and get a firm grasp on all things crypto. Once you understand that NFTs are non-replicable digital assets, you should also understand that each NFT is its own market. But to trade them, there needs to be a marketplace. That’s where projects like OpenSea come into play. opensea OpenSea, the First NFT Marketplace Touted as the first and largest NFT marketplace, you can find all sorts of unique digital items at OpenSea. Besides digital art, there are collectibles, game items, domain names, even digital representations of physical assets. Essentially, OpenSea is like an eBay for NFTs with millions of assets organized into hundreds of categories. The first time you visit OpenSea, it can seem a bit overwhelming. So you can start with a simple search for things like in-game assets, digital art, or maybe you just want to poke around and explore. If you’re interested in gaming and want to learn how to create games on the blockchain, take the Ethereum Game Programming course at Ivan on Tech Academy. Sign up and get started today! Connecting to OpenSea After setting up your wallet, it’s time to connect to OpenSea and unlock it. Then you can see any owned assets on your OpenSea account page. Just make sure to have some ETH to pay for your items and gas costs. For simplicity’s sake, when we’re talking about the Ethereum network, we’ll simply write “Ethereum.” But we’ll use “ETH” as the ticker symbol when talking about the Ether cryptocurrency. ETH is used to pay for gas fees and is the default currency on OpenSea. Searching for NFTs on OpenSea The “Browse” page is the heart of OpenSea when looking for items to buy. If you know the item’s name, you can type it into the search bar. Otherwise, you can use various sorting and filtering options as needed. The top collections and trending items default to the top spot of the search results. However, you can refine the sort options by “Recently Listed,” “Expiring Soon,” “Highest Price,” “Most Viewers,” and so on. There are several filters as well. You can filter by collection, by currency, and by shareable traits. To sum up, there are lots of options to help you search. OpenSea Bundles Most buyers and sellers on NFT marketplaces deal with single items. However, sellers can bundle up to 30 items in a listing. This cap at 30 items has to do with gas limits, Ethereum blocks, trust minimization, and single transactions. But like with single listings, you can scroll down the page to add the title, description, and price. Also, when you add values to the ending price and expiration dates, you are changing a Fixed Listing to a Dutch auction (see below). Bundles are a popular way for sellers to drive revenue, and these types of sales are growing steadily. Selling Strategies on OpenSea As far as selling strategies go, Fixed Price Listings and Dutch auctions are typically best for selling lower-ticket items. On the other hand, higher-priced items tend to do better in English-style auctions. Regardless of which type you choose, the process is the same – you select your item and click the “Sell” button. OpenSea also offers gas-free transactions when the highest bidder gets an NFT on an English auction. Neither buyer nor seller has to pay the gas to execute these transactions—although one has to wonder how long this will continue with the expensive gas costs on Ethereum presently. Also, even though your listing is public by default, you can change it to private by toggling the privacy switch. It will still be visible to the public, but only the specified address can buy it. Neither are you locked in after listing on the OpenSea NFT marketplace. There are options to cancel the listing, reduce the price, or add another listing. OpenSea Fees and Currencies Fees OpenSea boasts that they have the lowest fees in the NFT space. They take 2.5% of the sales price. This fee is low in comparison to other platforms that take up to 7.5%. Also, there is no service fee for buyers, while others charge up to 3% on top of the sale price. Furthermore, traditional auction websites are known to take up to 12% of profits. Other Marketplaces If you have NFTs from other marketplaces, you can still list them on OpenSea so long as they’re in your wallet. Custom Currencies OpenSea has over 200 payment options available. You can change the crypto you’ll accept when selling—this includes stablecoins. As mentioned, ETH is the default, and OpenSea converts ETH to wETH, but other tokens are available: The Future of OpenSea and NFTs NFT use cases are growing and appear to be limited only by the imagination. So far, those getting the most attention are in-game items, art, collectibles, virtual worlds, and tokenized real-world assets. But more things are sure to come, especially as the sector further integrates with decentralized finance (DeFi). More integration means more NFT asset classes. In summary, with all the attention and new projects pouring into the NFT ecosystem, 2021 will surely go down as a pivotal year. It only stands to reason that the top NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, Rarible, and Nifty Gateway (the Winklevoss twins’ acquisition), are poised to prosper. If you want to work in the NFT ecosystem or just learn more about it, you’ll first need to develop a strong foundation in crypto. Why not start with the Crypto Basics Course? Or check out all the blockchain courses at Ivan on Tech Academy and get started now!