OpenSea Migrates to Seaport Protocol in Bid to Lower Transaction Costs

Leading non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea is revamping its back end and moving from the Wyvern protocol to its self-developed Seaport protocol, the company announced in a Tuesday blog post.

OpenSea says the switch could significantly reduce transaction costs on the platform, lowering "gas" costs by “about 35% based on last year’s data,” according to the blog post. The company estimates the switch will save users $460 million in the next year.

“Seaport is a game changer, it’s open source, inherently decentralized and a modern foundation that will help us (and any teams using it) build and release new features more quickly,” OpenSea said in the post.

OpenSea first announced it would eventually be building on top of Seaport at the end of May. While OpenSea created the first version of Seaport, it said the protocol is open source and meant to be used by all builders, creators and collectors of NFTs.

Sellers on the platform will have to pay a one-time fee per collection to sell NFTs on the platform using the new protocol.

In addition to lowering gas costs, moving to Seaport will allow OpenSea to eliminate initiation fees, let users make offers on entire collections and make its wallet signatures “easier to read and understand.”

Improving signature clarity is presumably a security measure, meant to quell the rise of phishing scams that have stolen millions of dollars of NFTs in the past year.

Read more: US Charges Ex-OpenSea Exec With NFT Insider Trading