OpenSea Faces Backlash For Launching New NFT Tool Amid The Bear Market

Updated: 21 July 2023

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OpenSea, one of the world’s largest web3 marketplaces for non-fungible tokens and crypto assets, has suffered light community backlash after announcing its new NFT trading feature amid the recent crypto bear market. The crypto bear market began sometime mid-last month and has left many NFTs in massive losses.

OpenSea Launches NFT Deals

On July 20, 2023, the NFT marketplace announced its new feature, allowing collectors to trade NFTs directly with each other and add WETH to “sweeten the deal. The new “Let’s make a deal” feature is a peer-to-peer NFT swap function to help traders bolster their collections and engage with other collectors seamlessly.

Introducing Deals: offer your NFTs for theirs, securely on OpenSea.

👉 https://t.co/bTciJLUWDK pic.twitter.com/KR2MLbi7jh

— OpenSea (@opensea) July 20, 2023

In a July 20 blog post, OpenSea wrote that the new feature will allow collectors to trade non-fungible tokens with each other. The trading feature will be powered by its native protocol Seaport. The new product aims to secure the NFT swapping, fending off “sketchy DMs and websites” that many collectors fall victim to when trading NFTs.

OpenSea NFTs marketplace requires users to visit its deal page and enter their username or wallet to start making new NFT deals.NFT collectors can select up to 30 NFTs as well as the amount of WETH to add to the swap. Once users successfully link their crypto wallet, they can submit their deals for consideration.

At the time of writing, OpenSea requires the NFTs on both sides of the deal to be on the same chain and from verified collections. Upon success deal, collectors will only be required to pay any gas fees needed for the transfers. Deals swaps will not have other fees like OpenSea fees and creator royalties.

OpenSea Faces Light Community Backlash

OpenSea has suffered a light community backlash despite launching such an important tool. A group of crypto community on Twitter has shared their disgruntlement with the new OpenSea’s NFT trading feature amid the recent general bear market.

The majority of disgruntled collectors argue that OpenSea is late launching such a feature like this now. Some say since the non-fungible token has recently suffered a brutal comedown, it requires value, not innovation. While expressing his disgruntlement, Aaron Saga, an NFT influencer, remarked:

“Currently, this space needs value not innovation. Value means giving back to this space, while innovation means taking liquidity from this space during a bear market where collections are at their all time lows and majority of people are bag holding.”

https://twitter.com/AaronSage/status/1682138190336098304?s=20

Nonetheless, not all collectors are unhappy with OpenSea advancement. Most of the Twitter crypto community is somehow impressed by the reached milestone, maintaining that the NFT space needs some innovation too. Innovation is good at the right timing.

Nice thread.

I disagree that they should “give back” never has a web2 platform ever given back revenue. EBay for eg, would they give fees back if their volume dropped? No, they would use them to innovate to increase sales.

Entitlement in this space at times is too high.

— Franklyn (@0xFranklyn) July 20, 2023