As NFT activity continues to slow down, the industry’s biggest players have joined forces to make it more widespread. The most recent company to do this is OpenSea, which has launched natively on the layer-1 blockchain, Avalanche, both companies told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.
In an email to TechCrunch, Shiva Rajaraman, VP of product at OpenSea, said, “The future of web3 is multi-chain; and it’s always been our goal to offer the best selection and connect people with projects and creators across the chains they prefer.”
OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace in the world, will work on the blockchain alongside other platforms like NFTrade and NFT marketplaces that focus on Avalanche, like Joepegs and Kaloo. With Avalanche, the company said, OpenSea users will be able to settle NFT transactions in less than a second and pay low transaction fees.
John Wu, the president of Ava Labs, told TechCrunch, “We listen to our community, and part of our community really wanted to have OpenSea. We have a budding and vibrant creator and NFT community, and they wanted OpenSea as a choice.”
All Avalanche-based NFT collections will be in OpenSea, and more will be added over time.
Wu also said that Avalanche works with a number of web2 companies, such as business and consumer brands as well as sports teams. Wu said that these businesses wanted OpenSea to be a choice on Avalanche.
“They want to know if there is a scalable chain, since web2 is so much bigger than web3.” Wu said, “They want a network that can handle a lot of users at once.” With OpenSea, these companies feel a lot more at ease.
About 80 million NFTs have been traded on OpenSea so far. Together, they have been worth more than $20 billion. In January, when the subsector’s popularity was at an all-time high, the platform was worth $13.3 billion. Based on data from CryptoSlam, Avalanche is the seventh-largest blockchain in terms of the amount of NFTs that were sold, with about $404.6 million in sales.
Even though the NFT market has been slowing down in recent months, Avalanche’s NFT sales have gone up by 38.52 percent to $2.1 million in the last 30 days, according to data from CryptoSlam.
“The whole NFT market is down, and it’s down a lot,” Wu said. “But if you break down the NFT market […] a lot of the fluff is gone. What is starting to pick up is a new category of utility and fan engagement, along other categories outside of the collectible world.”
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