Putting the blame for opensea’s woes on “the nature of the blockchain” is a cheap way of avoiding responsibility. Opinion by lil_smush
As the industry’s de facto one-stop shop for NFTs, OpenSea has also attracted most of the criticism. The question of whether it has been a success for its investors is probably less important for the health of the sector than whether it has been a success for the creators it purports to serve.
Events this week have precipitated something of an identity crisis: Does OpenSea want to be a marketplace, a hub for artists or an unregulated casino?On Monday, traders started to notice valuable NFTs selling for well below their asking prices. The cheapest tokens in the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection will run you around $200,000 – so why didSome news outlets and data providers characterized it as a “bug,” borrowing language fromIt has to do with the way OpenSea processes listings on the blockchain. To list an NFT for sale on OpenSea, you first need to “approve” the token for trading on its platform. This is an on-chain transaction, so you’ll need to pay gas fees to the network. Once you’ve “approved” the token, you pick your price and the NFT is listed for sale. Now imagine that an hour later the market value of your NFT drops significantly. OpenSea lets you re-list the same NFT at a lower price without paying extra gas fees, but ends up creating a new listing instead of just lowering the price of the old one. It’s the cost of working with data directly on the blockchain: an append-only distributed ledger that’s purposely resistant to change. OpenSea can’t change a listing on-chain, because what’s already happened on-chain can’t be changed. This sense of immutability is the basic fundament of blockchain tech. If you list at 1 ETH, then drop it to 0.8 before making a sale at 0.6, you’ve still got two unfulfilled listings floating around, at 1 ETH and 0.8 ETH. In the case of the Ape that sold for 0.77 ETH, its owner minted the token last year when the dollar value of the Bored Ape Yacht Club was essentially zero. He bounced it around between a few different wallets over the past nine months and listed it for 250 ETH about two weeks ago. But a look at the token’s “Item History” on OpenSea shows there are plenty of other old, unfulfilled listings from around the time TBALLER minted the NFT. The listings may have expired, or TBALLER may have used the “lower price” button to create new ones – but the old ones are still there, even now. And because canceling a listing is an on-chain transaction, you’ll need to pay gas fees for each cancellation . Crucially, these were TBALLER’s own listings. Buying an NFT with someone else’s uncanceled listings attached won’t make you vulnerable to this sort of sniping. Still, it’s a miserable reality: If you’ve ever sold a token on OpenSea, odds are you’ve got a few uncanceled listings somewhere out there – listings that will almost certainly be an expensive hassle to cancel. So, the 0.77 ETH sale wasn’t the result of a “bug,” really. It’s just the way the platform is built. OpenSea said as much in an email to CoinDesk earlier this week, characterizing the sale as “not an exploit or a bug,” but instead"an issue that arises because of the nature of the blockchain." Not accidentally, the statement contains strong echoes of crypto’s overarching libertarian security philosophy. It’s
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