Why does Opensea become more popular than other Marketplaces?

Why does Opensea become more popular than other Marketplaces?

OpenSea is an exchange designed to work with the Ethereum blockchain to produce and sell NFTs that represent digital assets like images, songs, and even domains. A marketplace is a location where goods can be bought and sold quickly. Think about Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon. And a crucial characteristic of most markets is that they only permit others to sell the commodity; they don't control the inventory of it. We will discuss the popular marketplace here and what is the future of NFTs in 2023 for OpenSea.

How well-known is OpenSea, and what do they do?

A project's success cannot be traced to a select few elements. It needs a fantastic product, a fantastic team, perfect timing, and a ton of luck. Even though OpenSea appears to have possessed all of these, we could at least attempt to assess what precisely they did well to get to the point they are today.

Rapidly Developing Supply and Demand

The appropriately named "chicken-and-egg conundrum" is one of the most significant obstacles to creating a marketplace, as Lenny Rachitsky (an ex-product manager at Airbnb) explained in his newsletter. If no customers are using the platform to purchase the product, how do you get vendors to list their goods with you?

Along with this hustle, user-friendly features allowed for simple supplier onboarding. The permissionless listing of NFTs does not require any permissions or laborious onboarding processes. Additionally, OpenSea devised a method for the seller to pass on to the buyer the expense of minting additional NFTs on Ethereum. Both of these capabilities significantly lowered the obstacles to onboarding emerging projects and artists, notably influencing the platform's extensive selection of NFTs.

Maximised User Satisfaction

A marketplace should not just concentrate on boosting supply, as Sarah Tavel argues in her blog article; it also has to add product features to optimize customers' happiness. Similar to how Uber made payments seamless by automatically billing credit cards or how Airbnb created the super host program, which rewards hosts who achieve certain criteria with a unique display badge, making them more appealing to potential guests. Also outstanding in this area was OpenSea.

One of their major accomplishments was the implementation of powerful filtering and sorting tools that made it simple to find NFTs. Though it might seem unimportant, this is not. Each NFT collection has unique qualities and attributes. Users may focus their search on a specific collection by using OpenSea's "custom" filtering and sorting, which changes depending on the resource being browsed.

Made The Correct Decisions

One factor that contributes to success—one that is essential but is not the only one—is a good product. Every project has countless decisions to make throughout its existence, and the decisions they make determine whether it will succeed in the wide sea and ride the currents of success or fail and sink. OpenSea made a lot of wise decisions in its ascent to the top.

Additionally, this belief in NFTs is what allowed them to withstand the 2018 crypto winter. When the cryptocurrency markets were at an all-time low and few projects were capable of surviving, OpenSea operated with a tiny staff of only seven people, continued to charge trading fees to maintain the company's solvent status, and continued to expand.

OpenSea's Future Plans

When it comes to NFT markets, OpenSea is currently the market leader. However, the young guy on the street, LooksRare, poses a very significant danger to them. This newly established NFT marketplace has a lot going for it, including lower costs than OpenSea, a native token that significantly increases its attractiveness to cryptocurrency natives, and a pricing structure that splits ALL of its costs with token holders. LooksRare has already outperformed all other platforms, as seen in the table above, and is closing in on the transaction as well as the Eth quantities of OpenSea.

Is this OpenSea's response to introducing its token? It's not that simple. Being a US firm, OpenSea prefers to get along with US regulations and cannot take the chance of launching a token only to anger officials and jeopardize their ability to conduct business. To move forward, OpenSea must continue to focus on making its consumers as happy as possible while also considering expanding to new use cases.

Conclusion

It should be emphasized that some of the aforementioned choices, such as utility as collateral and fractionalization of NFTs, may subject OpenSea to regulatory attention. They must thus proceed cautiously. Given the legislative uncertainties surrounding all things crypto, legislation is a significant potential barrier that OpenSea must constantly monitor. They may even think about advocating for crypto-friendly regulations as a dominant player in the cryptocurrency world to advance the ecosystem. Since enormous power entails great responsibility.