Once the face of non -buttons (NFTS) tokens, Opensea is in the midst of a reinvention. The market that has helped transform digital collectibles into a global craze is now trying to position themselves as a web3 house where users can exchange transparent not only but also tokens and, ultimately, a wider range of challenge and other chain active activities.
Earlier this year, Opensea announced that it would go out with a sea token, creating a great anticipation around what the token would be used and what the platform would become. We know little about the token, but Opensea’s CMO, Adam Hollander, shared that the Opensea Foundation would publish more details in early October.
In this conversation with Coindesk, Hollander explains how the platform has developed beyond NFTS, the sea token for a long time and the challenge of keeping both longtime users and new arrivals have engaged in an increasingly crowded cryptographic market.
Coindesk: With the change of Opensea brand, with whom do you try to compete and where is this pivot?
Adam Hollander: I would say that we want people to consider OpenSsea as their web3 home, which means that you should be able to easily exchange any type of assets through any extremely transparent and easily, easily, whatever level of crypto experience.
So, if you are someone who is in the trenches that exchange every day, we have a lot of very robust features for you. And if you are someone who does not have much experience in crypto, then we will build a lot of very easy to use features to integrate in crypto and make sure you can find out what is to do tokens, NFT, other types of asset in mind.
So, if you move away from the NFT market and include trading on the platform, what are the features you mentioned that will be available?
We are the largest NFT market in the world. We expect us to always be the largest NFT market in the world, and we are very careful about this clientele and creators and artists and we are therefore not away from the NFT. We evolve and expand our platform so that it can be a single place where you can come and exchange anything. Now, the natural evolution of this in recent months has been trading of token, and you can therefore already come to Opensea, and you can exchange fungible tokens now on 22 extremely transparent chains
But we build new features, literally, day by day.
I would not say that our vision is limited to tokens and NFTs, there are a variety of really interesting things that people are now doing the head with assets of the real world and the tokenization of things in the real world, everything, from Pokémon Cards to real estate.
And not to say that OPENESSEA has immediate plans in one of these particular places, but we consider this as one place that you can call your web3 for practically everything you would do in a chain.
Since the volume NFT is not close to the summits, and since the exchange market has become so saturated, how do you plan to follow?
The volume today for the NFT is not what it was at the top when, literally, Jimmy Fallon and the presidents and everyone spoke of NFTS every day. That being said, there were several billion dollars in volume in the first quarter of this year only on the NFT. And it is therefore a dynamic market.
We actually see significant increases on this market during the year. And with regard to the trading of tokens and mecoins, and everything that happens to the chain, apart from the NFT, there are hundreds of billions of dollars in volume that occur on the market, and Opensea is experiencing significant growth.
Since we launched our new award program, we have experienced almost 400% volume growth only on Opensea, and it is really exciting for us, because it means that we have built an incredible product.
The announcement of the aerial version came from the Opensea Foundation 10 months ago. He has not yet been released, so why have people waiting for so long?
The foundation publishes the token. I would probably dispute the hypothesis that the tokens are supposed to be released quickly from the day they are announced. There are a lot of examples of tokens that have been on or even officially announced and that have not really been released for years and I would say that there is no good or bad way to do it, apart, of course, to validate that everyone wants it to happen immediately, because everyone is very excited to be rewarded for all time and the energy and the volume they drive through a site Openessea.
I would simply tell you that it is very important for the Opensea Foundation that it is not the same to release and forget. If you look at the majority of coins to your example, they tend to go up very quickly to the right, then they immediately descend to the right very quickly.
And most of them, we are not really talking about, and it’s because they don’t really serve as a goal. They were not released for a particular reason other than the company has decided, let’s launch a token. And people are always delighted with the opportunity to bring down free money on the head, but in the end, which is important for us, is that the sea token must be an integral part of the OpenSea ecosystem.
We are very deliberate in our creative discussions with the bases around the ways that can be sweat, and a large part of what we are trying to do is innovative, and a large part of what the foundation provides simply takes time.
We think we will free our token when the time has come to release it. This applies to what is good for Opensea, which is good for the community, which is good for macro factors. There are a number of calculation that comes into this. When we take it out, we believe that the market will appreciate that the Foundation and the Opensea have been extremely thought out and deliberate on the way this token should exist in the context of our ecosystem, not as the same to be released and forget, and, hope it, as something that has much more power than the tokens that people are used to seeing Ardropped.
There have been OGS online chatting that could be angry with the new arrivals that could come to the platform and find ways to get free money, while the OGs have stayed for years may not get their fair share.
How do you balance new users on the platform and encourage them to stay on Post Airdrop while keeping your original committed users who may have the impression that new people are looking for ways to earn fast money?
We of course appreciate all the historical users who have led the volume via Opensea in the last seven to eight years, and we have a plan where we see these individuals, and the Foundation thinks that this will be able to reward them in an appropriate manner.
We, as a business, must also have continuous people using the platform and drawing it today as one of their main crypto tools, and we also think that we will be able to effectively reward the people who participate with our platform today and participate in our different reward phases. And so I would simply say that it is not used as an Opensea or the foundation to have whole cohorts of customers, whether it is our most loyal long-term customers, and that is not used for having people who actively use the platform today.
And so we have a number of plans in place that we think we will be able to do a very good job to reward everyone effectively. I cannot talk about it to the details of this, apart from saying, you know what we have said in our ads, that if you have been on Opensea for years and that you have led a lot of historical volume, we see you, you are not forgotten. And if you use the platform today and you participate in our reward programs, you will be considerably considered by the TGE Foundation.
Read more: Opensea teases the sea token with the final phase of awards in the middle of the application launch
