American-based NFT marketplace OpenSea has announced plans to upgrade its app in an attempt to compete with rivals.
Founded in 2017, OpenSea has released plans to launch ‘OpenSea 2.0’ that aims to enhance the user experience and create a more customisable marketplace.
Currently on OpenSea, all NFTs are displayed identically regardless of whether they are game tokens or event tickets. The upgrade looks to establish greater differentiation between the categories as the number of uses for NFTs increase.
The firm is looking to display ticket NFTs on a calendar, sorted by date. Devin Finzer, CEO of OpenSea, commented: “We really want to have a marketplace interface that can be better customised to suit each type of use case.”
Rival marketplaces such as Blur and Tensor have recently risen in popularity, offering professional trading experiences, a feature that OpenSea is also looking to add to its new and improved platform.
Global sales of NFTs dropped by 63% to $8.7b in 2023, according to CryptoSlam, whereas Bitcoin saw a rise of 160%. It is believed that to improve global sales, new uses of NFTs must be found. However the platform ‘X’ previously known as ‘Twitter’ stopped supporting NFTs, which allowed people to display them as their profile pictures on the platform.
“One of the things we’ve been most excited about is not necessarily how do you drive the most volume, but rather, how do you build sort of the most compelling use cases for NFTs,” added Finzer.
As well as global issues, personally OpenSea has experienced a turbulent time. The company laid off 50% of its employees in November – the firm also laid off 20% of its employees in July 2022 following market decline – and its former Head of Product was convicted for insider trading in August.
The firm also recieved backlash after it decided to stop mandatory royalties for NFT creators. According to DappRadar, rival marketplaces have displayed higher trading volumes than OpenSea over the past 30 days.
Responding to this Finzer, said: “We tend to not focus too much on kind of the short-term marketplace dynamics.”
