Three years after a peak NFT mania that drove monthly trading volume to billions of dollars and put the Bored Ape Yacht Club on The Tonight Show, the collectible tokens have started regaining attention—and so too is the once-dominant NFT marketplace, OpenSea.
Long hoped for and often speculated by NFT traders, OpenSea will soon have a token courtesy of the OpenSea Foundation.
The token—SEA—is expected to reward both current and historical users of OpenSea’s platforms, and is “designed to encourage greater community engagement and support the next chapter of the NFT ecosystem.”
Learn everything else you need to know about SEA below.
Who will be airdropped SEA?
Full eligibility criteria has not been shared by the OpenSea Foundation, but it’s anticipated that current and historical users of OpenSea’s NFT marketplace and its underlying Seaport Protocol will be eligible for the SEA token.
A spokesperson for the OpenSea Foundation previously confirmed to Decrypt that U.S. residents will be eligible to participate in the airdrop—a point that was previously rumored to be untrue. Additionally, the Foundation will not require users to pass know your customer or KYC verifications in order to participate in the SEA token airdrop.
OpenSea 2.0 and XP
Alongside the Foundation’s token announcement, OpenSea released its completely reimagined marketplace, OS2, into public beta on February 13. The one-time top NFT platform scaled down its team in an effort to be more nimble and rethink its model, leading to a new trading platform with features like fungible token trading and an XP reward system.
Although details have not been confirmed, many users expect that the XP earned while using OS2 will play a role in their eventual token airdrop. Similar platforms, like Blur and Magic Eden, have utilized “points” programs like XP to help determine token allocations for their users.
In the opening few days of OS2, users were earning XP for taking actions like bidding and listing NFTs on the new marketplace. However, after loud community criticism about the impact on NFT prices for providing XP for listings, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer made the decision to modify the XP system—only rewarding XP for “buying and holding” NFTs in the near term.
we've heard the feedback on the current XP system, and we're putting a pause on XP given directly for listing and bidding
while we don’t think liquidity rewards are inherently bad (see more below), we understand that there are a lot of strong emotions towards point systems, and…
— dfinzer.eth | opensea (@dfinzer) February 18, 2025
“We understand that there are a lot of strong emotions towards point systems, and that the NFT market as a whole is in a unique spot right now,” Finzer posted on X (formerly Twitter). “We’re building OS to support this space long-term, so we’re pausing this part of the rewards program while we think through the best path forward.”
In addition to gaining XP for participating on the platform, users can earn XP via “shipments,” which can be seen as care packages full of XP for specific actions on the platform. For example, a small group of users that bought and held an NFT on the platform was eligible for a shipment of XP, according to the CEO.
When will SEA launch?
Although details around the SEA token launch date and allocations are unknown, crypto bettors are placing wagers on those details, according to prediction markets on Polymarket.
A market that allows users to bet on an OpenSea token airdrop before April 2025 is currently trading at 13% in favor, down from an all-time high of 84% when speculation about the OpenSea token was circulating in December 2024. More than $360,000 has been wagered on the market.
A similar market provides bettors with the opportunity to wager whether or not the OpenSea Foundation will drop its token before July 2025–a deadline which bettors think is far likelier and currently trades at a 75% chance of happening. However, only about $17,000 has been bet in that market, as of this writing.
Lastly, a market allows users to wager on the success of the SEA token. At this time, more than $260,000 has been wagered on Polymarket in a market attempting to predict the fully diluted valuation (FDV) of an OpenSea token one day after its launch.
Thus far, crypto bettors are pointing to the token FDV being valued between $1-3 billion a day after launch, with the ranges of $3-5 billion and $5-10 billion right behind it in odds.
The market also gives a 23% chance that no OpenSea token is launched by July 2025.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
Editor's note: This story was originally published on December 18, 2024 and last updated with new details on February 19, 2025.
