OpenSea goes multichain after 98% drop in volume
Once one of the largest NFT marketplaces and a staunch supporter of Ethereum’s ERC-721 protocol, OpenSea has decided to go multi-blockchain to try to recoup losses from its 98% decline in trading volumes.
The OpenSea Foundation is working on an airdrop of its new SEA tokens, reworking its website, and adding deeper support for over a dozen blockchains.
OpenSea is also adding support for cross-blockchain NFT purchases, such as buying a Solana NFT using a non-Solana payment method. It’s also reducing its marketplace fees to 0.5% and swap fees to $0 for its OS2 Open Beta.
The exchange achieved unicorn status as an early startup, riding a wave of trading activity that peaked at $476 million on May 1, 2022, following the launch of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Otherdeed metaverse land.
Today, trading volumes have declined 98% from that figure and rarely exceed single-digit millions.
Three years since the glory days
On almost every relevant metric, the multi-year decline is evident. In January 2022, OpenSea boasted monthly NFT sales of over 5 million. By January 2025, however, sales were down 80%.
OpenSea’s royalty fees were $268 million in January 2022, yet failed to reach even $4 million last month.
The company is hopeful that its platform redesign will help it recover. OpenSea laid off nearly half of its workforce in November 2023 to prepare for OpenSea 2.0
That Wells Notice expressed concern about potential unregistered securities on the platform.
Read more: NFT wash trade accounts for 6.5% of daily sales volume on OpenSea
OpenSea has also faced stiff competition from other NFT marketplaces like Blur and Magic Eden. Magic Eden incidentally saw some success with adding other NFT-supporting blockchains like Ethereum and Polygon after initially supporting only Polygon.
This could explain the exchange’s decision to include a substantial number of new blockchains in OpenSea 2.0.
Overall, OpenSea is simply struggling to deal with a multi-year decline in NFT popularity. These days, most traders simply prefer fungible memecoins rather than non-fungible media.
Its website relaunch and token offering is unlikely to change this global trend.
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Edit 15:59 UTC, Feb 14: Attributed the SEA token to the OpenSea Foundation.
Edit 16:17 UTC, Feb 14: Corrected the date of the company’s 2023 downsizing.
Edit 15:15 UTC, Feb 17: Updated to remove reference to OpenSea-led airdrop.