A look at decentralized OpenSea competitors

Last year's NFT frenzy was emblematic of a gold rush. In the fashion of the literal Gold Rush in the early 1850s, the greatest beneficiaries were those that provided the infrastructure and tools necessary to dig for gold, realizing outsized returns through their pick-and-shovel play. While masses of new market participants came rushing in, the flywheel kept spinning ever faster for NFT marketplaces, creating escape velocity for one marketplace, in particular, that is, OpenSea.

Doubling down on its first-mover advantage, OpenSea essentially functions as a plug-and-play platform, which allows users to automatically access all their Ethereum, Polygon, and Klaytn NFTs in a single place. Due to automatic indexing, people can bid on NFTs that are not even listed on OpenSea. Along with its initial community-centric communication efforts, this approach effectively resulted in it monopolizing the landscape of Ethereum NFT marketplaces. However, as traffic and trading volume soared, the marketplace appeared to become a victim of its own success, increasingly falling from grace from the perspective of a lot of its users.