NFT Marketplace Opensea Migrates to Seaport Protocol, Transition to Cut Network Fees by 35%

On Tuesday, the leading non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace in terms of all-time sales, Opensea, announced it is migrating to Seaport, an open source Web3 marketplace protocol. Opensea says the Seaport protocol migration from the Wyvern protocol will cut network fees by 35%, and users will no longer have to pay an account initialization fee.

Opensea Migrates From Wyvern to Seaport: ‘A Foundation to Empower the Developer Community’

Opensea is moving to the Seaport protocol in order to enhance the NFT marketplace experience for users. The Opensea development team details that the migration will cut gas costs significantly. Moving to Seaport will reduce fees by 35% and add a number of other features like zero account initialization fees. Signing features to confirm specific actions have also been improved, Opensea explained in a summary sent to Bitcoin.com News.

In a blog post describing Seaport, Opensea says that while the NFT marketplace is the first to leverage Seaport, the company is inviting the developer community to utilize it as well. “What we’ve really built is a foundation to empower the developer community to work together on this primitive. Opensea does not control or operate the Seaport protocol — we will be just one, among many, building on top of this shared protocol,” the company’s blog post notes.

Opensea’s Seaport summary adds:

The Seaport contracts emphasize efficiency and contain a significant amount of low-level assembly code. We’ve included a reference implementation that replicates the functionality of the optimized contract without any assembly code to enhance readability.

Opensea Leads the NFT Marketplace Competition With $31 Billion in All-Time Sales — Seaport Audited by Openzeppelin and Trail of Bits

Opensea is the leading NFT marketplace in terms of all-time sales with $31.09 billion according to dappradar.com statistics. Metrics further detail that Opensea has recorded a total of 1,801,409 traders and the average price on the NFT market is $641.36. However, NFT sales have dropped a great deal in recent times, and overall NFT sales across the entire ecosystem are down 30.40% since last week.

During the past 24 hours, Opensea’s sales volume dropped 11.36% as the current crypto bear market has not been friendly to the NFT ecosystem. Opensea’s Seaport blog post explains that during the early development process, Openzeppelin performed a security review. When Seaport was near complete, Opensea’s Seaport summary details Trail of Bits conducted an audit of the protocol.