Transcript Ep.568: How Can OpenSea Regain Dominance After Layoffs and the NFT Market Decline?

NFT expert gmoney says that OpenSea “rested on their laurels” far too long. Can the once-leading marketplace rise again?

gmoney:

What Blur did really well is they allowed... Almost like allow for pro trading to happen at scale, which is something that was really hard in OpenSea. And so, I generally don't trade NFTs, but one of the things when I go to sell stuff is that it's hard to sell stuff on OpenSea, right? Like I have to...It's a time consuming process, right? If I have a hundred NFTs of a collection and I want to sell some I have to list each one individually. I think what Blur did especially well right out of the gate was they allowed for, if I had 100 NFTs, I could list them pretty quickly. They also brought in liquidity on the bid side, so they incentivized people to buy on their platform.

Laura Shin:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto eight years ago and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the November 10th, 2023 episode of Unchained.

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Today's guest is gmoney, NFT collector and founder of 9dcc. Welcome gmoney.

gmoney:

Hey Laura, how are you?

Laura Shin:

Good, glad to have you.

gmoney:

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Laura Shin:

Yeah. Last week, OpenSea announced that it had laid off half of its staff. This was a stunning move for what had long been the leading NFT platform for most of NFT history, especially since this was not OpenSea's first round of layoffs in this bear market. What do you think happened there? Why has OpenSea stumbled so hard?

gmoney: