OpenSea Pro

OpenSea Unveils OpenSea Pro To Compete With Blur

(Source: OpenSea)

OpenSea most definitely needs no introduction as one of the most prominent NFT marketplaces in the Web3 industry. Just today, OpenSea announced their new initiative to provide a new trading experience for their advanced trader base with their new OpenSea Pro platform.

This new OpenSea Pro platform is a re-brand of their previous acquisition of Gem, which was to bring advanced trading tools to their NFT enthusiasts and traders. With this new rebranded platform, OpenSea is pushing their main NFT marketplace to offer an advanced aggregator for NFTs that will pull listings from 170 different marketplaces for traders to route their NFT trades from, optimize gas, and allow for more advanced floor-sweeping. Other characteristics include inventory management and the ability to trade with OpenSea Pro on mobile devices.

The most important part of it all is that OpenSea Pro will have 0% trading fees, with the goal of becoming one of the most efficient and advanced NFT trading platforms for advanced NFT traders.

Does this model sound familiar?

Obviously, we are seeing continued competition between OpenSea and Blur Marketplace. Just a few months ago, we saw OpenSea also drop their main NFT platform to 0% trading fees to mimic that of Blur, which caused a lot of ruckus in the NFT community over NFT politics, especially with each exchange blocking certain transactions from each other. But we can see that OpenSea is totally rebranding their Gem V2 aggregator to pretty much rival Blur with the advanced aggregation tools and the 0% trading fees so that NFT traders will be able to perform multiple transactions without worrying about losing funds through fees.

(Source: Dune Analytics @sealaunch)

As we can see, even though OpenSea and Blur were at war with each other a few months ago, with OpenSea even dropping their trading fees to 0%, it seems like Blur continued to outperform OpenSea in terms of ETH trading volume consistently and day after day for all of February and March. We do see an evident decline in Blur’s total ETH volume traded over the past month; however, Blur still seems to outperform OpenSea.

With the introduction of OpenSea Pro, it will be very interesting to see how this chart changes over the next couple of months, as the Pro aggregator will literally be a competing model to that of Blur. Potentially, if there is some incentive to use OpenSea Pro beyond just the 0% marketplace fees, then we could definitely see a large surge in OpenSea Pro’s ETH trading volume. Maybe such as a future airdrop opportunity to incentivize traders to trade on their platform more?