Finding the next challenger to OpenSea

LooksRare quickly developed into a strong rival of OpenSea just two months after its launch, but it was also caught up in the currency mixing and cashing storm overnight, triggering a sell-off and huge controversy.

So after LooksRare, who else has the potential to challenge OpenSea and break the monopoly of the NFT market?

Potential stocks that have been launched on the platform

X2Y2

Recently, X2Y2 released a Beta version on Ethereum. During the testing phase, users can trade NFTs with zero transaction fees and zero royalties. The current features available for testing include fixed price sales, quotes, and series quotes. Existing features will be upgraded and new features will be added, including instant push notifications for buying and selling, auctions, batch listings, batch purchases, rarity rankings, batch sending, and online listings. In the official version of X2Y2, a 2% handling fee will be charged to trading users, but the handling fee will be distributed to token staking users.

X2Y2's current layout is similar to LooksRare, but it was launched as an alternative to OpenSea and LooksRare. Traders on X2Y2 will not receive rewards related to their trading volume, and the only rewards on the platform will come from staking X2Y2. In addition, the X2Y2 team is anonymous and does not conduct private placements, but instead conducts an initial liquidity offering (ILO) to raise funds needed to provide liquidity for projects on Uniswap. In summary, what X2Y2 wants to do is to be a truly decentralized NFT market platform that shares revenue with users.

Zora

Zora is not a newcomer to the NFT market. It was founded in 2020, went online in January 2021, and has been operating for more than a year.

At the beginning of its establishment, Zora won the favor of institutions such as Kindred Ventures and Coinbase Ventures. Later, it received investment from Paradigm, a well-known investment institution in the industry.

Zora calls itself a supporter of Web 3.0 and decentralization. Its NFT casting and market protocols are open and permissionless, which is why it has been favored by some decentralized autonomous organizations, such as PleasrDAO. At the same time, Atsuko Sato, the original creator of Linkin Park and Doge emoticons, is also a Zora user.

In addition, ZORA recently launched version V3, which allows creators to obtain royalties immediately and integrates royalty registration, which means that NFT owners can configure their royalties on the Zora Marketplace Protocol. ZORA V3 is a one-way deployment, which means that even if the platform crashes, the market will continue to operate normally because orders are run on the chain, not the database. In addition, the Gas fee mechanism and development tools have been optimized. The team said that a new ownership structure has been created in the form of Zora Fee Switch NFT (ZORFs), owned by Zora DAO.

Zora is also a project that emphasizes environmental protection. It has invested in a Honduran wind farm called Cerro de Hula and a project called Agrocortex (which is dedicated to protecting the Amazon rainforest) to compensate for 20 tons of carbon emissions and 30 tons of carbon emissions respectively. Zora, which is based on Ethereum, considers its high energy costs, so they hope to offset the cost of Ethereum emissions through dedicated carbon compensation.

Currently, Zora has not issued any tokens. Once the token economic model is introduced, it will attract greater attention and market.

Not yet released platform

NYSE NFT

Recently, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced plans to trade digital assets in the same way as stocks, providing an online marketplace for a variety of digital goods, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs), cryptocurrencies, digital media, and artworks.

The New York Stock Exchange said it hopes to become a financial exchange for cryptocurrencies and NFTs, which means it will compete with current mainstream NFT platforms such as OpenSea and Rarible. Currently, the New York Stock Exchange has submitted an application to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on February 10, planning to register a trademark for the exchange.

The New York Stock Exchange is the world's largest securities trading platform by market value, with an average daily trading volume of hundreds of billions of dollars. Unlike the NFT issued in April last year, this move by the New York Stock Exchange marks a broader and deeper layout and investment in the blockchain field. Once the New York Stock Exchange NFT trading platform is launched, it is bound to bring huge incremental users and funds.

However, the New York Stock Exchange said in a statement that it has no immediate plans to launch cryptocurrency or NFT trading, but "regularly considers new products and their impact on our trademarks and protects our intellectual property accordingly."

Etherscan

Recently, Etherscan, an Ethereum block browser and data analysis platform, has added the "View NFT" and "Chat with Owner" functions. Etherscan has added a new "View NFT" button for all NFT transactions, and users can click to view NFT details. Specifically, after clicking in, you can see various information about this NFT, such as NFT pattern, past selling price, transfer record, etc.

In addition, the NFT details page supports the "Chat with Owner" function, which allows users to contact NFT holders through Blockscan Chat by clicking a button. This also means that users can use this function to promote NFT transactions. For example, during the NFT transaction process, buyers and sellers can communicate directly about NFT purchases through Blockscan Chat, and both parties can reduce the fees associated with platforms such as OpenSea. Currently, 42,895 NFTs are covered in Etherscan. Therefore, if Etherscan is likely to launch the NFT trading function, it will be a heavy blow to OpenSea.

Conclusion

From the perspective of transaction volume, user loyalty, etc., OpenSea is currently in an absolute leading and even monopolistic position in the NFT trading market.

As the pace of NFT development has been determined and digital collectibles continue to become mainstream, more people are bound to enter in 2022. Of course, in addition to the ones mentioned above, there are also some NFT platforms issued by exchanges, such as Coinbase NFT and FTX NFT, which are also worth paying attention to and looking forward to. The entry of these newcomers will promote the wider development of the NFT market.