{"id":8013,"date":"2022-06-15T14:39:48","date_gmt":"2022-06-15T14:39:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/06\/15\/opensea-says-its-latest-update-could-significantly-lower-fees\/"},"modified":"2022-06-15T14:39:49","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T14:39:49","slug":"opensea-says-its-latest-update-could-significantly-lower-fees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/06\/15\/opensea-says-its-latest-update-could-significantly-lower-fees\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenSea says its latest update could \u2018significantly\u2019 lower fees"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/6\/14\/23166774\/opensea-seaport-portocol-update-switch-gas-fees<\/a>
\n
<\/br><\/code><\/p>\n

\n

OpenSea is announcing<\/a> that users buying and selling non-fungible tokens<\/a> (NFTs) on its platform could see fees drop by around 35 percent. This is thanks to the fact that the company is upgrading the protocol that underpins its marketplace, migrating to a platform called Seaport to handle its transactions. Offering lower gas fees may be a way for OpenSea to differentiate itself from the other NFT marketplaces that are competing with it (though not always successfully<\/a>). The change does, however, come at a rough time in the crypto market overall. <\/p>\n

Seaport is an open-source project OpenSea announced last month, and the company says it\u2019s significantly more efficient than its old system when it comes to dealing with the blockchain. (The Seaport announcement<\/a> contains a few technical details about why that is, if you\u2019re interested.) According to OpenSea, first-time sellers will no longer have to pay the initialization fee, which I\u2019ve seen range from $50 to $450. That\u2019s in addition to the reduction in transaction fees.<\/p>\n

The fees that are being eliminated or reduced are called gas fees<\/a>, which OpenSea neither controls nor profits from. Instead, they\u2019re a cost of activity on blockchains like Ethereum or Polygon. The crypto you pay in gas fees goes to the miners that are responsible for making sure that your data ends up on the blockchain. The more data you want to write or the more actions you want to take, the more gas you\u2019ll have to pay for. How much that gas costs depends mostly on how busy the blockchain is; the more people trying to pay for transactions, the more you\u2019ll have to offer to make sure your transaction is the one that gets carried out. <\/p>\n

\n