OpenSea launches NFT marketplace Seaport

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NFT marketplace OpenSea has unveiled its new Web3 marketplace protocol– SeaPort–which will allow NFT merchants to make direct trades with digital collectables buyers. The decentralised platform will not be owned or operated by OpenSea; instead, smart contracts will govern it, allowing all NFT builders and collectors to use it.

“Most current NFT marketplaces only allow for listings where one party agrees to supply an NFT and the other agrees to supply a payment token. Seaport takes a different approach: offerers can agree to supply a number of ETH / ERC20 / ERC721 / ERC1155 items — this is the “offer.” In order for that offer to be accepted, a number of items must be received by the recipients indicated by the offerer–this is the ‘consideration’,” OpenSea explained in a blog post.

“Seaport also supports the option to fulfill any number of listings at once through a set of ‘fulfillments'–each fulfillment corresponds to a single item transfer and indicates a group of offer items that the submitter can match with corresponding consideration items. As long as each consideration item on each listing is fully credited after all fulfillments have been applied, the offerers can leverage their coincidence of wants and complete their transfers,” the blog added.

Early in the development process, OpenZeppelin did a security evaluation of the Seaport protocol, and Trail of Bits completed an audit of the protocol near the end of the current deployment. During either evaluation, no serious vulnerabilities were detected.

The NFT sector has witnessed major competition in recent times, with several well-known companies entering the space and aiming to improvise. With Seaport, OpenSea is looking to take advantage of the increasing popularity of NFTs and the various use cases they will inevitably have. OpenSea also recently acquired Gem, an NFT marketplace place aggregator, to further enhance user experience.

The writer is the founder at yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash