In just two years, it went from being unknown to being valued at over 13 billion U.S. dollars, and then in another two years, it was "cut off" by 90% from a valuation of 10 billion U.S. dollars, to the point where it was considered to be sold. Such a seemingly "roller coaster" What kind of experience will it be like with ups and downs?
This is the truest portrayal of OpenSea in the past four years - not long ago, OpenSea CEO and co-founder Devin Finzer revealed that OpenSea has received acquisition intentions and remains open to potential acquisitions, but has not Be specific about when and by whom it will be acquired.
As a "unicorn" level existence that was almost discontinued in the NFT trading market, how did OpenSea rise rapidly, how did it fall to the front in the competition in the NFT market, and what possible disruptors will the next NFT market pattern usher in? with variables?
01 OpenSea: A unicorn with a valuation of over 10 billion is now “cut off”
Like Uniswap and Dune, OpenSea is also an entrepreneurial miracle that started from scratch and rose rapidly in the Web3 field - especially in the two years starting from 2021, OpenSea's valuation has been overwhelming, rising from no one to care about it to US$13 billion, becoming the entire NFT The existence of the market "securing the top spot".
The story begins in January 2018, when the two co-founders of OpenSea, Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah, created OpenSea for users to buy and sell NFTs.
However, because the entire NFT market is still deserted except for Cryptokitties, which once triggered short-term speculation, the platform's NFT trading users and transaction volume have been hovering at low levels.
As of March 2020, OpenSea had only 5 employees, and the monthly transaction volume fluctuated around US$1 million. Calculated based on the 2.5% commission at that time, this meant that the monthly income was only US$28,000. Fortunately, Animoca announced at the end of 2019 Brands invested $2.1 million to keep OpenSea financially balanced.
OpenSea really took off in 2020. The two joint ventures planned to double their business volume by the end of 2020. Unexpectedly, with the gradual recovery of the encryption market starting in the second half of 2020, OpenSea's business volume soared rapidly. In September 2020 Just complete the task ahead of time.
Starting from 2021, the NFT bull market has completely kicked off. The number of active users and transaction volume of OpenSea has been rising. In July 2021, the transaction volume surged to 350 million US dollars, and it received US$100 million in financing led by a16z. After the investment Valuation reaches US$1.5 billion.
One month later, in August 2021, OpenSea’s trading volume soared tenfold again, reaching US$3.4 billion, earning over US$85 million in commission income.
From then until January 2022, OpenSea was almost unbeatable, with a monthly transaction volume of more than 3.5 billion US dollars, occupying 90% of the market share of the NFT industry, and a maximum valuation of more than 13.3 billion US dollars. Therefore, from a data perspective, OpenSea is definitely the entire The NFT market is "too big to fail" and even far exceeds Uniswap's market share and influence on the DEX track.
OpenSea 2022年-2024年月度交易量
And this has also become OpenSea's swan song to dominate the NFT trading market. As the earliest pioneer to lay out the NFT trading market and fully reap the explosive dividends, OpenSea's transaction volume plummeted in June 2022:
From nearly $2.6 billion in May to less than $700 million in June, OpenSea’s monthly trading volume has now dropped to $120 million, a drop of more than 95% from its peak in January 2022.
According to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, Tiger Global Management has currently written down 94% of the value of its shares in OpenSea, while Coatue has also reduced the value of its shares in OpenSea by 90% to $13 million, almost all of which are "toe cuts."
02 The evolution of the NFT track
The heaviest blow to OpenSea was the new overlord, Blur, which now accounts for more than 70% of the NFT trading market share. An NFT platform launched at the end of 2022, it quickly surpassed it in less than a year through Airdrop Token. OpenSea has become the largest NFT market.
Dune data shows that as of the time of publication, Blur’s share of the NFT market in the past week was as high as 73.7%, ranking first; Opensea’s share was 21.7%, ranking second.
NFT交易平台市场份额占比情况
If we look back at the evolution of the NFT track landscape and Blur's extremely powerful "disruption" ability, we will find that none of the changes are surprising.
"Vampire Attack" by LooksRare, x2y2
First of all, the miracle of OpenSea’s rise is inseparable to a certain extent from its first-mover advantage gained through perseverance in the early troughs. After the NFT bull market broke out, OpenSea’s dominant position led to product-dimensional competition among the NFT trading markets. "Vampire" attacks almost never stop.
As we all know, there is an obvious trend in the Web3 and encryption world. Whether it is DeFi, NFT, chain games or infrastructure, there are more and more similar projects. However, homogeneous competition is serious, and the differences are almost limited to names. , UI, Token incentives, transaction fees, etc. differences.
“In market competition, it doesn’t matter who copies whom, what matters is who is first.” This is especially true for Web3. This view has been repeatedly proven by itself since Sushi’s vampire attack on Uniswap.
Therefore, starting from 2022, a number of "OpenSea killers" such as LooksRare and x2y2 began to focus on OpenSea's delay in issuing Tokens. They temporarily gained a relative advantage by relying on the incentive form of Token distribution, but the Airdrop involution was not completed. Shake Opensea's position.
Almost all of the transaction reward mechanisms triggered a large number of false orders. After a short period of prosperity, they quickly fell silent, and no strong competitor emerged to truly occupy the NFT market share.
Blur: The real “wall-breaker” in the NFT track
At the end of 2022, Blur appeared and launched Bid Airdrop, which went further than the transaction reward mechanism (Bid Airdrop is a marketing strategy in crypto asset projects that aims to distribute Tokens to participants by participating in auctions or bidding), completely Solving the problem of insufficient NFT market depth:
Encourage bids (make offer). The closer the bid is to the floor price, the more rewards there will be. “Essentially, the token of the secondary market acquisition platform is subsidizing the bidders.” This is also similar to the rise of Aave - there are An agreement that helps large investors "ship" is a good agreement.
Looking at the development trajectory of the past year, Blur and its founder Tieshun can be said to be the top "wall-breakers" in various "mature tracks":
NFT trading track: Blur overturned OpenSea, which was firmly sitting on Diaoyutai, and "cut off" its valuation from US$13.3 billion to US$1.4 billion;
NFT lending track: Blend’s loan transaction total exceeds US$4.6 billion, becoming the leader;
L2 track: Blast’s TVL exceeded US$1.78 billion. According to L2Beat statistics, it is second only to Arbitrum (US$12.34 billion) and Optimism (US$6.6 billion). It is higher than Base, zkSync and a series of other L2s, ranking among the top three L2s. .
03 New trends in the NFT market
Since 2023, in addition to Blur completing its "replacement" of OpenSea, some potential variables have emerged.
First of all, the rise of pan-Bitcoin NFTs represented by Ordinals has set off a new wave of "BitcoinFi", and the activity of transactions within the Bitcoin ecosystem has reached a new peak.
According to the Cryptoslam data in the figure below, NFT sales on the Bitcoin chain reached US$238 million in the past 30 days, making it the second largest blockchain in terms of NFT sales, second only to Ethereum (US$456 million) and higher than Solana (US$232 million). USD) and Polygon (USD 50.03 million).
The latest data from Dune shows that as of February 16, the cumulative fee for minting Ordinals exceeded 6,150 BTC, exceeding $320 million.
This has also given rise to the rise of Bitcoin-based NFT trading markets such as the OKX Web3 Wallet Ordinals Market and the UniSat NFT Trading Market. As of last week, the total transaction volume of the OKX Web3 Wallet Ordinals Market has exceeded US$1.3 billion.
In addition, starting from the second half of 2023, the NFT market seems to be gradually stabilizing. The floor prices of many blue-chip NFTs have begun to rebound or rise sharply. The NFT track in the Solana ecosystem has also ushered in a new hype cycle.
At the same time, pan-NFTs with similar inscriptions such as ERC404 have emerged again. As "new assets" with duality, such pan-NFTs can be traded on OpenSea and Uniswap, which may also change the NFT market structure in the future. bring greater impact.
In particular, Uniswap has previously acquired the NFT trading market Genie, sending a clear signal to enter the NFT trading market - Genie aggregates transactions in other NFT markets, and Uniswap provides transaction depth.
Overall, competition in the NFT market has been centered around the product dimension and asset dimension:
Through the product dimension innovation of the liquidity reward mechanism, Blur’s dimensionality reduction in the first half of 2023 hit a number of old-generation NFT trading platforms such as OpenSea and x2y2;
And OKX, UniSat, etc. relied on the new asset class of Inscription to rise rapidly in the second half of 2023 and opened up new territories;
Now that 2024 has begun, will the rising popularity of ERC404, as a new asset type, give traditional Token trading protocols such as Uniswap new NFT tickets, thus disrupting the NFT market structure in 2024? Worth paying attention to.
