By Karen, Foresight News
On November 4th, Beijing time, OpenSea released a preview animation, in which a ship was setting sail, indicating that the platform will soon release a new version in December. At the same time, OpenSea launched registration for the waiting list. As of the time of writing, 174,000 people have joined the waiting list.
This news quickly triggered the community's expectations and speculations about token issuance, airdrop activities, reward mechanisms, and L2. According to Devin Finzer, founder and CEO of OpenSea, "The new version of OpenSea is completely rebuilt, because real innovation sometimes requires us to take a step back and rethink and redesign the entire framework." OpenSea Pro co-founder vasa also revealed that the development of the new version of OpenSea began a year ago.
Regarding the specific functions or features of the new version, combined with OpenSea's response and the author's analysis, it is speculated that it may include the following highlights:
1. According to a post by Azuki researcher and Mocaverse consultant wale.moca, the new version of OpenSea will have a leaderboard, which will also provide XP points. OpenSea officials retweeted this.
Based on this speculation, the new version is likely to launch a points program. Considering that OpenSea is a US company, the rewards may not necessarily be OpenSea tokens, but may also include platform profit sharing. It is worth noting that in August of this year, OpenSea received a Wells notice from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the SEC threatened to sue OpenSea because they believed that NFTs on the OpenSea platform were securities. In response, OpenSea said, "In addition to sticking to its position, it also promised to provide $5 million to help pay the legal fees of NFT creators and developers who received the Wells notice."
It is worth mentioning that OpenSea Pro (Gem, the NFT market aggregator acquired by OpenSea) once announced on its official website that it would launch a reward event, claiming that "scoring and tracking user activities are currently underway, and the game is about to begin." However, this content has now been removed from the official website.
In addition, to commemorate the launch of OpenSea Pro, OpenSea Pro released the Gemesis NFT series in April last year. As of now, the floor price of this series of NFTs is 0.0139 ETH, up 242% in the past 24 hours, and the cumulative trading volume displayed on OpenSea has reached 8180 ETH. In this series, the rarity of NFTs is closely related to the time when they were first traded using Gem. The earlier the transaction, the higher the rarity. Therefore, if OpenSea conducts airdrop activities in the future, in addition to OpenSea's trading users, Gemesis NFT holders are also likely to be taken into consideration.
2. Release some new features that benefit artists.
3. Deeper integration of GameFi. This can be seen from OpenSea’s recent move. In late October, OpenSea integrated the Base gaming ecosystem B3 Chain, aiming to improve users’ Web3 gaming experience and support faster and cheaper minting of NFT series and in-game items.
4. Implement account abstraction to make it easier for users and developers to access Web3.
5. According to @DefiIgnas wish list, OpenSea 2.0 is expected to support Bitcoin ordinals, rune rewards, simplified onboarding, portfolio pages and token airdrops, as well as fragmented NFTs, NFT Launchpad, social features (Instagram for NFTs), and native mobile applications. In response, OpenSea CTO Nadav Hollander said that this is a good list and asked @DefiIgnas what the top requirements are.
Of course, some people speculate that OpenSea will make a pump.fun version of the NFT market, but this may require the fragmentation of NFTs.
In the current situation where memes are prevalent, the road to the revival of the NFT craze seems to be full of challenges. Especially considering that OpenSea's competitor Blur has performed poorly after issuing tokens, and Magic Eden is about to issue tokens, it remains to be seen whether OpenSea 2.0 can reignite the NFT craze.
It is worth mentioning that OpenSea team member @ken_cadima will hold a technical lecture during Devcon (November 13) to reveal the specific details of OpenSea 2.0. Foresight News will continue to pay attention.
