OpenSea Now Supports NFTs on Zora's Ethereum Layer-2 Network

By Sander Lutz

Zora, the NFT minting platform that recently launched its own Ethereum layer-2 scaling network to facilitate faster and cheaper minting of on-chain artwork, will now be supported by NFT marketplace OpenSea, both companies announced Friday. 

The news means that art pieces minted on Zora’s network can now be bought and sold on OpenSea, and that OpenSea’s suite of NFT-related tools will now be able to mint assets on Zora's scaling network. The Zora Network is built on the tech stack of existing scaling network, Optimism.

OpenSea is only the latest of more than 45 NFT platforms, including Sound, Gallery, and Rainbow, that support the new Zora network. OpenSea is a mainstay of the NFT industry that has historically accounted for the majority of organic NFT trading volume, although it was surpassed earlier this year by rival Blur and its tokenized trading incentives.

Zora was founded in 2020 as a service that offered artists the infrastructure to sell on-chain, digital tokens tied to physical artwork and items. It has since pivoted to building an open-source protocol designed to allow any users to mint and sell NFTs, as well as build boutique NFT marketplaces.

The company’s move in June from the Ethereum mainnet to a layer-2 scaling solution has made minting 25 times cheaper, Zora CEO and co-founder Jacob Horne previously told Decrypt.

“L2s have been around for a year now—mainnet Optimism has existed, Arbitrum has existed—but have skewed towards DeFi and a financial use case,” he said at the time. “I think the ecosystem and the market is ready for a network that’s purpose-built for art and media, and really leaning into all the interesting experimental things you can do when you have a network like that.”

Since launching the Zora network two weeks ago, the company says it has facilitated over 70,000 mints and onboarded more than 50,000 collectors onto its own chain.

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