OpenSea Moves to Seaport Protocol to Cut Ethereum Gas Fees by 35%

OpenSea has moved to the “Seaport Protocol,” a new smart contract that the NFT marketplace says will allow its 1.8 million users to save money on Ethereum gas fees.

With the Seaport contract, users will be able to save roughly 35% on gas, the company said. And new accounts will no longer require that one-time “setup fee” OpenSea previously charged.

NFTs are blockchain-based tokens that show ownership over digital or physical assets. Gas fees are essentially transaction fees, and they can rise quickly during periods of high demand.

Prior to OpenSea’s migration to Seaport, it used the less-efficient Wyvern protocol, which was also leveraged by attackers back in February in an off-platform phishing scam to siphon $1.7 million from traders. 

“We estimate the new contract will save [over] $460 million in total fees each year,” OpenSea wrote in a Twitter thread detailing the Seaport announcement.

Seaport is an open-source and decentralized protocol that has been audited by Web3 security firms OpenZeppelin and Trail of Bits. It has been engineered to allow users to include multiple items per on-chain transaction and isn’t exclusive to OpenSea. 

“It’s for all NFT builders,” the marketplace said when it first announced the protocol May 20.

Now that it’s on Seaport, OpenSea is building a tool that will allow NFT holders to list multiple NFTs for sale at once and only pay one gas fee for the batch of listings (competing marketplace LookRare launched a bulk listings feature two months ago). 

OpenSea also said that in the future, NFT collection owners will be able to add more than one payout address for sales and royalties as well.

Prior to its launch this week, OpenSea held a two-week code audit report contest with a prize pool of up to 1 million USDC (Circle’s stablecoin) for its Seaport protocol. Anyone who found issues in the code could submit their findings.

As OpenSea moves to Seaport, it’s worth noting that offers and listings will no longer be able to be added to the Wyvern protocol after June 21. By July 13, OpenSea will stop fetching Wyvern contract data, meaning that listings created on the Wyvern contract will no longer be visible on the site. 

OpenSea’s move to a more gas-efficient protocol comes a month after Kraken’s upcoming NFT marketplace announced that it would have zero gas fees for on-platform trades.