The OpenSea non-fungible token (NFT) platform has upgraded to work with its Seaport protocol. Among other things, this new feature saves more than $460 million a year in transaction fees, based on data from the last 12 months.
OpenSea launches Seaport
OpenSea’s non-fungible token marketplace (NFT) has completed an update to incorporate its new Seaport protocol. One of the significant enhancements to this protocol is a streamlining of the platform’s functionality to significantly reduce transaction fees:
Today, we’re officially moving to the Seaport protocol!
We estimate the new contract will save $460m + in total fees each year. But, that’s not all Let’s go through the updates… https://t.co/89B1FJARnl
– OpenSea (@opensea) June 14, 2022
Based on figures from May 2021 to May 2022, OpenSea estimates that the way Seaport works will save an average of 35% in fees, compared to Wyvern Protocol, which has been used until now. This is the equivalent of over $460 million per year.
The illustration below illustrates this comparison by highlighting the amount of gas used by each protocol for different types of transactions:
Figure 1: Gas used by Wyrven and Seaport
In short, the amount of gas used by a smart contract will depend on the functions it uses. This is where the new protocol gains in optimisation over its predecessor.
In addition to the transaction costs, Seaport now allows for collection offers. This is interesting in the case where a specific attribute of an NFT collection is of interest:
Figure 2: Collection offers on OpenSea
The example in figure 2 shows how this new functionality allows the setting up of an offer, on all terrains of the Otherside metaverse that have an artefact. Thus, it is no longer necessary to make offers on a case-by-case basis. In addition, the floor prices for each attribute are also displayed during this process.
A completely open source protocol
Another point to note is that OpenSea has built the Seaport protocol to be completely open source. The marketplace invites developers from all walks of life to analyze the code on GitHub, with a view to improving it or reporting possible flaws.
OpenSea also informs that OpenZeppelin has analysed the security of the protocol and that Trail of Bits has conducted an audit. No major flaws were found during these reviews.
In addition, the platform announces the upcoming arrival of a feature that allows multiple NFTs to be listed in a single transaction. In addition, users will be able to define multiple payment addresses.
Thus, the leader of the NFT market continues to evolve despite the context and even has 35 job offers on its site, at the time of writing these lines.
