What Is OpenSea NFT Marketplace & How does it make money?

Opensea is the marketplace that is used to mint, sell, purchase, or exchange NFTs on different blockchain options.

You might find NFTs pretty alien but it is not like that. In the previous five years, NFTs changes the way, we deal with digital arts like images, paintings, music, and videos. The NFTs were introduced in 2017 first by CryptoKitties named NFT project and NFTs changes the game in these 5 years completely. Now, these digital assets are bought and sold for hundreds and thousands of dollars if not millions.

Last year some of the NFT projects created history in NFTs space and people who were not familiar with NFTs are now NFTs collectors, creators, or enthusiasts. These projects were beeple, CryptoPunks, and Bored Apes which sold for millions of dollars, and every newspaper and blog covered it. People started jumping into it like it is a quick rich scheme. To sell and buy these NFTs there are many NFT marketplaces available online but one of the most popular NFT marketplaces is OpenSea.

What Is OpenSea NFT Marketplace?

Opensea is the marketplace that is used to mint, sell, purchase, or exchange NFTs on different blockchain options. This platform is based on the Ethereum blockchain but now you can mint your NFTs on different blockchain networks like polygon. Users can set prices of their choice and use many great features of this platform to mint any type of digital art. 

How does opensea make money?

OpenSea makes money by charging transaction fees on NFTs transactions. OpenSea charges a 2.5% transaction fee on each NFT sale or purchase from the buyer. If an NFT is sold for 1 Eth so the buyer has to pay a 0.025 Eth transaction fee to the opensea to perform this transaction.

How OpenSea marketplace started?

The OpenSea was created back in 2018 and the idea of creating this marketplace was from the success of Cryptokitties. The founders of opensea Alex Atallah and Devine Finzer spent their time communicating with the NFTs community on discord servers and launched the beta version of it in December 2017. They believed and said many times that they could create an amazon or eBay of the NFTs space. Both raised an investment of $120K after the launch of the beta version of opensea and later on raised a heavy investment of $130 million from investors and celebrities.

They invested this money in building an engineers team, marketing, expanding their network, and configuring new blockchain options. As I have mentioned above opensea previously was limited to the Ethereum blockchain only and that needs a lot of computing power to perform minting and transactions now opensea integrated new blockchains like polygon, Solana, and the list goes on.OpenSea has a valuation of more than $1.5 billion at this time.

Wyvern Protocol in OpenSea:

The main agenda of OpenSea was to create minimal trust transactions between two parties like buyer and seller don’t have to trust other, and the 2nd party will behave themselves. This is possible because of smart contracts. Smart contracts have logics that make the whole transaction processed or not. To achieve this opensea uses a protocol named wyvern. This is the group of smart contracts which is tested in the real world. This wyvern protocol allows users to transfer ownership instantly like the buyer and seller have to transfer crypto payment and NFT at the same time.

Final thoughts:

There are millions of dollars of transactions that have been processed on this NFT marketplace in the form of NFT transactions. Meanwhile big social media influencers like Logan Paul and Gary Vaynerchuk are pushing new audiences towards opensea and NFT space. What do you think about the OpenSea marketplace or do you hold NFTs. Let me know in the comments.

Related: 12 Best NFT Marketplaces In August 2022

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