Legacy Users ‘Not Forgotten’ as OpenSea Balances Newcomers, OGs Ahead of Token Launch

Once the face of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), OpenSea is in the middle of a reinvention. The marketplace that helped turn digital collectibles into a global craze is now trying to position itself as a Web3 home where users can seamlessly trade not just NFTs but also tokens and, eventually, a broader range of DeFi activity and other on-chain assets.

Earlier this year, the OpenSea Foundation announced that it would be coming out with a SEA token, creating much anticipation around what the token would be used for and what the platform would become. Little is known about the token, but OpenSea’s CMO Adam Hollander shared that the OpenSea Foundation would release more details in early October. (OpenSea and the OpenSea Foundation are two separate entities)

In this conversation with CoinDesk, Hollander discusses how the platform is expanding beyond NFTs, the long-delayed SEA token, and the challenge of keeping both longtime users and newcomers engaged in an increasingly crowded crypto market.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

CoinDesk: With the rebrand of OpenSea, who are you trying to compete with and where is this pivot heading?

Adam Hollander: I would say we broadly want people to view OpenSea as their Web3 home, which means that you should be able to easily trade any type of asset across any chain or wallet extremely seamlessly and easily, regardless of your level of experience in crypto.

So if you are somebody that is in the trenches trading every day, then we have a lot of very robust features for you. And if you’re somebody that doesn’t have a lot of experience in crypto, then we’re going to be building a lot of very easy to use seamless features to onboard you into crypto and make sure that you can experience what it’s like to trade tokens, NFTs, other types of assets on-chain.

So if you are moving away from the NFT marketplace and include trading on the platform, what are some of those features you mentioned that will be available?

We are the world’s largest NFT marketplace. We expect we will always be the world’s largest NFT marketplace, and we care very deeply about that customer base and creators and artists and so we are not moving away from NFTs. We are evolving and expanding our platform so that it can be a single place where you can come and trade anything. Now the natural evolution of that over the last few months has been token trading, and so you can already come to OpenSea, and you can trade fungible tokens now across 22 chains extremely seamlessly

But we are building new features, literally, by the day.

I wouldn’t say that our vision is limited to just tokens and NFTs, there are a variety of really interesting things that people are doing now on-chain with real world assets and tokenization of things in the real world, anything from pokemon cards to real estate.

And not to say that OpenSea has immediate plans in any one of these particular places, but we are viewing this as a single place that you can call your web3 home for virtually anything that you would be doing on-chain.

Given that NFT volume is not near the highs it once was, and given that the exchange market has become so saturated, how do you plan to keep up?

The volume today for NFTs is not what it was at the peak when, literally, Jimmy Fallon and presidents and everyone else were talking about NFTs every day. That being said, there were several billion dollars of volume in just Q1 of this year alone on NFTs. And so it is a vibrant market.

We are actually seeing significant upticks in that market over the course of the year. And when it comes to token trading and memecoins, and everything else that happens on-chain, outside of NFTs, there are hundreds of billions of dollars of volume that are happening in market, and OpenSea is seeing significant growth.

Since we launched our new rewards program, we’ve seen almost 400% growth in volume just on OpenSea, and that’s really exciting for us, because it means that we have built an incredible product.

The airdrop announcement came from the OpenSea Foundation 10 months ago. It hasn’t been released yet, so why have people been waiting so long?

The Foundation is releasing the token. I would likely challenge the assumption that tokens are supposed to be released quickly from the day that they’re announced. There are lots of examples of tokens that have been hinted at or even formally announced and didn’t actually come out for years subsequent and I would say there’s no right or wrong way to do this, other than, of course, to validate that everybody wants it to happen immediately, because everybody’s very excited about being rewarded for all of the time and energy and loyalty and volume that they drove through a site like OpenSea.

I would simply say to you that it’s very important for the OpenSea foundation that this is not a memecoin to be released and forgotten. If you look at the majority of coins to your example, they tend to go up into the right very quickly, and then they immediately go down into the right very quickly.

And most of them, we’re not really talking about anymore, and that’s because they don’t really serve a purpose. They weren’t released for any particular reason other than the company decided, let’s launch a token. And people are always excited about the opportunity to have free money dropped on their heads, but at the end of the day, what’s important for us is that SEA token needs to be an integral part of the OpenSea ecosystem.

We are being very deliberate in our creative discussions with the foundation around ways that that can transpire, and a lot of what we’re trying to do is innovative, and a lot of what the foundation is planning simply takes time.

We believe that we will release our token when the time is right to release it. That goes for what’s right for OpenSea, what’s right for the community, what’s right for macro factors. There’s a number of calculus that go into that. When we release it, we believe the market will appreciate that the foundation and OpenSea have been extremely thoughtful and deliberate about the way that this token should exist as a part of our ecosystem not as a memecoin to be released and forgotten, and hopefully as something that has a lot more staying power than the tokens people are used to seeing airdropped.

There has been some chatter online from OGs who may be angry at newcomers who might come onto the platform and find ways to get free money, while the OGs have stuck around for years might not get their fair share.

How do you balance bringing on new users on the platform and incentive them to stay on post airdrop while also keeping your original users engaged who may feel like the new folks are looking for ways to make fast money?

We of course, appreciate all of the historical users that have driven volume through OpenSea in the last seven to eight years, and we have a plan where we see those individuals, and the Foundation believes that it’s going to be able to reward them appropriately.

We also as a business, need to have people continuously using the platform and leveraging it today as one of their main tools in crypto, and we also believe that we’re going to be able to effectively reward people that are participating with our platform today and participating in our different phases of rewards. And so I would simply say that it does not serve OpenSea or the Foundation well to have entire cohorts of customers, whether it’s our long-term most loyal customers upset, and it also does not serve us well to have people that are using the platform actively today upset.

And so we have a number of plans in place that we think we’re going to be able to do a very good job at rewarding everybody in an effective way. I can’t speak to the details of that, other than to say, You know what we’ve said in our announcements, that if you’ve been on OpenSea for years and you’ve driven a lot of historical volume, we see you, you are not forgotten. And if you’re using the platform today and you’re participating in our rewards programs, then you will be meaningfully considered by the Foundation at TGE.

Read more: OpenSea Teases SEA Token With Final Phase of Rewards Amid App Launch

UPDATE (OCT 1., 18:10 UTC): Clarified that the OpenSea Foundation is in charge of the airdrop and that OpenSea is a separate entity, at the request of the OpenSea team. Also added line about interview edited for brevity and clarity.