Gem lead developer: OpenSea acquisition hasn’t killed possibility of token

Following today’s news that NFT marketplace OpenSea has acquired NFT aggregator Gem, some of Gem's loyal users were dismayed that this may kill the chances of a token.

Yet Gem’s lead developer Vasa poured cold water on that idea, suggesting it’s still a possibility for the project to launch one. 

“Rewards/Tokens are not out of [the] question,” Vasa said in the project’s Discord server, after stating that Gem will still operate as a separate brand and product to OpenSea.

“We will not change the way we work with all the marketplaces we support and we’ll make sure that we remain unbiased and transparent in the way we operate,” he added.

Gems pools liquidity from various NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea and LooksRare, which allows users to “sweep the floor” of a collection (buying a range of its lower end).

In the crypto ecosystem, it’s common for projects to “decentralize” themselves as project founders hand over control to their communities. Typically when this happens, they establish a governance system and hand out tokens to their early adopters to help their most loyal users take charge. Votes using these tokens can then be used to determine how the platform develops over time. 

Yet since these tokens tend to have a monetary value, such airdrops can be very lucrative. Big airdrops in the past have included Uniswap, dYdX and the Ethereum Name Service. Some of Gem’s users have hoped that it will do the same — and may have spent significant sums of crypto to use the service multiple times with many wallets, in the hope that they get rewarded someday (a process known as airdrop farming).

Since OpenSea has not yet launched a token — despite rival NFT platforms such as LooksRare doing so — it seemed plausible that a project under its wing would also not do so. But Vasa’s message suggests that's not necessarily true.