The OpenSea Foundation on Thursday announced the upcoming launch of the SEA token to reward active, loyal, and historical users of OpenSea’s NFT marketplace and its Seaport protocol.
While specific details about the token launch and allocation details are still forthcoming, a spokesperson for the OpenSea Foundation confirmed to Decrypt that users will not be required to complete know your customer (KYC) verification, and that U.S. users will be eligible to participate in the airdrop.
Both details dispel rumors that circulated earlier this week after a boilerplate language on a test website was revealed. OpenSea co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer took aim at the chatter on X earlier this week.
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In a statement, OpenSea Foundation General Manager James Hu said that the SEA token “will mark a major step in empowering our community and fostering the OpenSea ecosystem and the Seaport protocol on which it operates.” He added that it’s “designed to encourage greater community engagement and support the next chapter of the NFT ecosystem.”
OpenSea users have speculated about a token launch for years, including back in 2021 and 2022 when the NFT market was booming and OpenSea dominated it—but the company never committed to such a thing.
Speculation started picking up again in early December when it was discovered that an OpenSea Foundation was registered in the Cayman Islands—a move that often signals the launch of a crypto token.
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— OpenSea (@opensea) December 20, 2024
Now it’s officially coming alongside the marketplace’s “OS2” relaunch, which includes support for fungible token trading alongside NFTs. But why now?
“We really took a step back with this rebuild and we said: We want to build long-term for our community. We want to be much more crypto-native,” Finzer told Decrypt. “We want to really have a platform that feels and lives and breathes Web3, and having a token as part of that felt like the right thing to do for our users and the participants of the NFT ecosystem over the long haul.”
Traders have previously been rewarded with tokens from rival NFT marketplaces, including Blur and Magic Eden. But despite excitement from recipients on airdrop day, those tokens have trended down, and now trade for substantially less than their all-time high prices, respectively.
OpenSea will face a similar challenge in battling the short-term attention paid to airdropped tokens, especially when there’s always something new around the corner in crypto.
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“If you don’t have a product that people love, and you don’t have a real community, then sort of definitionally a token is going to be a short-term thing,” said Finzer. “But if you continue investing in the product and make the token a key ingredient in the future of the product, then I think you can take a much more long-term approach.”
OpenSea’s product investment comes to fruition in OS2, a “revitalized OpenSea” that—along with fungible token trading—will introduce an XP rewards system, an enhanced user experience, and a place to utilize the SEA token.
“It’s sort of a reimagining of every surface of OpenSea,” Finzer told Decrypt. “The big highlight is really that we’re expanding from just being an NFT marketplace to really a broader platform for trading all sorts of things."
The new platform has been in a closed beta for the last few months, offering select users the opportunity to test the features and provide feedback along the way. Finzer said that OpenSea has “seen a ton of excitement” from beta users around supporting multiple token types.
OS2’s arrival is part of a broader overhaul of OpenSea in which it aims to “reinvent” the culture and the company. OpenSea ruled the NFT market boom of yesteryear, skyrocketing to a $13.3 billion valuation in early 2022 on the back of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of VC funding. But as NFT demand cooled and rivals gained steam, OpenSea faced layoffs—and an existential crisis, it appears.
“In the bull market, we became far too Web2,” said Finzer. “Now we’re really leaning into a small, lean Web3, crypto-native team as we roll out this new product.”
The move continues a trend in which notable Web3 brands like Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs and Doodles attempt to reinvigorate the communities they built in 2021 by replacing the “corporate feel” that had permeated their brands as they got bigger.
Once the dominant trading marketplace for NFTs, particularly on Ethereum, OpenSea has fallen to around a 30% market share for Ethereum NFT trading, compared to 62% for Blur in the last six months according to Tiexo.
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But with the marketplace overhaul and impending SEA launch, OpenSea aims to welcome new and old users alike as a single place for all sorts of token trades—with rewards.
“We really want to be this company that ships delightful, incredible products to users,” said Finzer. “The long, painful journey to get to a place where we feel like we can do that was kind of tearing everything down and starting from scratch.”
“Now with this launch, we’re going to show the world who we are,” he added. “It’s the biggest moment in our history, but it’s also just the beginning.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
