"OpenSea is garbage."

The NFT community was very lively last night, and OpenSea was criticized again. The reason was that Brian Roberts, CFO of Lyft, the leading online car-hailing company in the United States, became the new CFO of OpenSea.

This was a good thing, but the new CFO announced his new plan as soon as he took office. He planned an IPO for OpenSea. He said: "If a company has such a fast growth rate, it would be stupid not to consider taking it public."

At present, no company has issued its own token after the IPO; at present, countless people have used hundreds of wallet addresses to swipe transactions on OpenSea in order to get OpenSea’s "potential" airdrops, and used their own swiping volume to bring revenue to OpenSea, but it is very likely that they will get nothing.

In fact, many people expected that OpenSea would choose IPO instead of issuing native tokens. First, OpenSea is headquartered in New York, and it will inevitably face many difficulties in compliance if it wants to issue tokens; second, OpenSea is essentially just a centralized Internet product.

OpenSea is actually no different from eBay, except that physical goods are replaced with digital goods (NFT). They are actually traditional C2C e-commerce platforms that earn revenue from the handling fees of each transaction. As of now, OpenSea's total transaction volume in the second half of 2021 has reached US$12.347 billion. OpenSea charges a 2.5% handling fee for each transaction, with total revenue of US$309 million.

"The world has suffered from OpenSea for a long time"

This is a phrase often said in the community. Although OpenSea has impressive achievements, occupies 97% of the market share in the NFT field, and has 750,000 users, OpenSea, which is essentially an Internet product, has not brought people the user experience that an Internet product should have.

With the explosion of NFT in the second half of this year, the traffic of OpenSea website has surged, but it is obvious that OpenSea is not prepared for this. Almost every time a phenomenal NFT is released or when KOLs such as Beanie and Gary Vaynerchuk promote a certain NFT series at the same time, the OpenSea website will crash due to the surge in the number of visitors.

If such a problem occurred when NFT just broke out, it could be understood that the team did not expect NFT to break out so quickly. However, now that half a year has passed since the outbreak, this problem still occurs frequently, which must be attributed to the procrastination and slackness of the OpenSea team. OpenSea even had the problem that all NFTs could not be placed for a period of time, which led to the NFTs that had been placed being bought one by one. The serious shortage of market supply caused the floor price to rise rapidly in a short period of time. After the problem of being unable to place orders returned to normal, the market supply recovered and the floor price fell rapidly. The problems caused by OpenSea caused countless buyers to suffer losses.

In addition, while OpenSea's "competitors" continue to develop, OpenSea's development seems to have stagnated.

SuperRare has launched a reward function, Nifty Gateway will open the function of trading NFTs using Ethereum wallets in January and can significantly save gas fees, Rarible has launched a private message function and Rarible Protocol DAO, which is used to create practical tools in the NFT field; NFT Trader allows people to trade their NFTs in the form of barter, and Genie allows people to buy in bulk and place orders.

Other trading platforms are developing in full swing, and the frequent introduction of new features has also given the community the confidence to continue to support, but OpenSea has remained stagnant in the tide of the times. Indeed, 97% of the market share is enough to give OpenSea a sufficient sense of security, and almost no platform has the opportunity to defeat OpenSea in a short period of time. But after Nate Chastain, OpenSea's most efficient product manager, was fired due to the "rat trading" incident, more and more people's suggestions were ignored, and more and more people reported problems and requested help but never received a response. OpenSea's declining efficiency and the arrogance of the team made more and more people dissatisfied.

What people often pursue is to make a Web3 product have the user experience of Web2, but as of now, it can be said that OpenSea is obviously a Web2 product but has the user experience of Web3.

OpenSea’s Web3 Vision

This sense of contradiction is also due to the inaccurate positioning of the OpenSea team. OpenSea's "semi-decentralization" also makes the entire platform a bit "weird". On the one hand, it wants to be as open as a decentralized platform, so there is no review process when users create NFTs. On the other hand, it can directly remove or freeze users' NFTs in a centralized manner.

However, the OpenSea team has also repeatedly expressed its vision of making OpenSea a Web3 application. When the founder of OpenSea was a guest on The First Mint podcast and talked about OpenSea's close partnership with other companies, he mentioned that "the biggest difference between Web3 and Web2 lies in the partnership between multiple companies (Multi-Company)", and OpenSea's new CFO bluntly stated that he wanted to build the future of NFT, Web3 and the digital economy.

Tokens play an extremely important role in Web3 applications. Whether it is used for community governance, user attention compensation or Skin-in-the-Game (sharing benefits and risks), tokens are indispensable tools. This is why people are looking forward to OpenSea issuing its own native tokens and believe that if OpenSea issues tokens, it will definitely issue airdrops to users. Moreover, given OpenSea's size and revenue, if the airdrops are valuable, they must be very valuable. Therefore, some people are willing to spend manpower and financial resources to interact with OpenSea one by one with hundreds of accounts, hoping to make a fortune when the airdrops are issued.

As soon as the news that OpenSea was planning an IPO came out, the community was filled with criticism.

Some people were upset because their dream of airdrops was dashed. They thought they could make some money, but they didn’t expect that they were actually contributing to OpenSea’s revenue. Others were angry because they didn’t fight for it.

The founder of OpenSea once mentioned in an interview that the reason for OpenSea's success was that it "appeared in the right place at the right time" and actively listened to users' suggestions to understand what they really wanted. OpenSea once had a first-mover advantage and actively listened to the community's suggestions. The community and users contributed greatly to its success step by step. At that time, OpenSea also showed that the team was working hard to move towards Web3.

However, after becoming so huge, OpenSea has become somewhat "stubborn".

OpenSea’s new CFO said: “If a company is growing so fast, it would be foolish not to consider taking it public.” However, is it “smart” for OpenSea, which was born from Web3, to abandon Web3 after its success?

Indeed, judging from OpenSea’s revenue, IPO is indeed a way to make more money, but this choice also means that it has betrayed its own Web3 ideals.

OpenSea's choice has been criticized by countless people. OpenSea's revenue comes from the residents of Web3, but OpenSea chose to share these profits with the residents of Web2 instead of sharing them with its own users. OpenSea's brand comes from the support of the community. It is the frequent use of hundreds of thousands of Web3 users every day that makes OpenSea famous and profitable. OpenSea should be incentivized, but choosing an IPO means that these supporters have to buy OpenSea's stocks to get incentives.

Nowadays, when we think about which platform can take on the functions of OpenSea and be more Web3-friendly, it is difficult to come up with an answer. Many people can't even name other platforms. OpenSea's monopoly has left many NFT platforms with no chance of survival. Some new platforms have adopted SushiSwap's approach to fight Uniswap in the hope of snatching food from OpenSea, but in the end, OpenSea's market share is still an astonishing 97%.

We cannot make choices for OpenSea, and it is difficult to guess the mindset of the OpenSea team. Perhaps OpenSea just wants to copy the old path of its predecessor Coinbase. Perhaps OpenSea’s choice was common in the Web2 era, but it is obviously unreasonable in the Web3 era.

The founder of OpenSea said: "We have prepared sufficient supplies to help us safely survive the cold winter." But when the winter comes, where should we go to keep warm?