Major NFT marketplace OpenSea is announcing a massive restructuring of its trading platform. Due to the great competition, which caused OpenSea to lose a lot of users, it has now decided to temporarily charge 0 percent transaction costs on the platform. The artists on the platform also get extra opportunities to earn at OpenSea.
Not the biggest anymore
Over the past period, OpenSea has rapidly lost market share to Blur. On February 18, this resulted in Blur overtaking OpenSea in terms of trading volume in Ethers. In response, OpenSea is now introducing the above measures to attract people back to their marketplace.
The aim of the new measures is to become the most dominant player in the market again. “Recent events, including Blur’s decision to scale back creator earnings and the false choice they force artists to make between liquidity on Blur or OpenSea, prove that our previous approach was unsuccessful,” OpenSea said in the statement. statement.
The growth in trading volume on Blur, according to OpenSea, is the result of their new royalty policy (the extra earnings for artists). Blur showed the difference in earnings between its own platform and that of OpenSea.
Competition is important
Within the NFT community, people are happy with the competition between the various marketplaces. According to the community, if OpenSea takes too much market share, that is dangerous, because with that monopoly they can determine the costs for the market. They can then increase the transaction costs, without there being any alternatives.
Within the community, people are suspicious of OpenSea and are especially afraid that costs will rise again at a later stage, provided the trading platform succeeds in taking over the market again.
For now, though, it’s important for the NFT market to see things pick up again. Since the bull market of 2021, the trading volume has fallen sharply on this relatively new form of tokens.