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In 2021, the NFT craze swept the globe; however, with the cryptocurrency entering a bear market, the NFT frenzy quickly dissipated. According to CryptoSlam data, global NFT sales amounted to only $8.7 billion last year, a 63.35% decrease from the $23.74 billion in 2022. Meanwhile, Bitcoin surged nearly 160% in 2023.
As the NFT craze subsided, Opensea, the leading NFT trading platform that was once valued at $13 billion in 2022 and successfully raised $300 million in Series C funding, saw its valuation plummet by almost 90% to $1.4 billion. The platform also announced a 50% workforce reduction last year.
To revitalize its prospects, Opensea is working on the Opensea 2.0 platform upgrade. Devin Finzer, the CEO of Opensea, mentioned in an interview with Bloomberg that the company is developing the Opensea 2.0 upgrade. With more token use cases being developed, Opensea aims to provide users with a better experience and improve the differentiation of NFTs.
Finzer pointed out that the current display of NFTs on Opensea and other platforms is uniform, regardless of whether they are gaming tokens or event tickets. Opensea hopes to create a market interface that can better cater to each type of application case through customized NFTs. Opensea is working on displaying ticket NFTs on the calendar, sorted by date.
The Opensea upgrade will also make it easier for customers to access its professional trading platform, allowing them to switch between "Collector View" and "Advanced View." Opensea is also seeking to improve the detection of fake NFT projects and harmful URLs, as scams often trick users into linking their wallets to malicious websites, ultimately stealing their cryptocurrency and NFTs.
Regarding Opensea's earlier deactivation of the mandatory royalty enforcement tool and its complete shift to an optional royalty mechanism in March 2024, causing a backlash from NFT creators, Devin Finzer declined to comment and did not respond to whether the enforcement tool would be reinstated in the future.
Discussing other trends, Finzer noted that he has been tracking the increasing trend of NFT usage on the Solana blockchain and the Bitcoin Ordinals craze. However, he remains optimistic about Ethereum as the preferred blockchain for NFTs, especially considering that Ethereum Layer 2 solutions have helped make transactions cheaper and faster.
Despite the surge in Bitcoin spot ETFs boosting Bitcoin prices, Finzer still does not believe that the Bitcoin blockchain is the preferred future for NFTs: "I really think the applications you can build on Bitcoin are likely limited to art-type use cases, not more diverse things. |
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