The SEA gift will be released on Thursday in honor of current, devoted, and past users of OpenSea’s NFT industry and Seaport process.

While more specific information about the key release and planning is still being provided, a spokesperson for the OpenSea Foundation confirmed to that U.S. people may be eligible to participate in the resupply and that they won’t need to pass KYC identification.

Both details remove speculations that surfaced earlier this week after a check website’s boilerplate language was exposed. Early this year, OpenSea co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer criticized the talk on X.

The SEA gift” may indicate a significant step in empowering our society and fostering the OpenSea habitat and the Seaport method on which it operates,” according to OpenSea Foundation General Manager James Hu in a statement. He continued,” It’s designed to encourage greater community engagement and support the next chapter of the NFT ecosystem.”

Users of OpenSea have been making speculative decisions about a token launch for years, including in 2021 and 2022, when the NFT market was booming and OpenSea dominated it, but the company never made a commitment to it.

In the first few days of December, speculation rekindled when it was discovered that an OpenSea Foundation was registered in the Cayman Islands, which frequently indicates the launch of a crypto token.

Now it’s officially coming alongside the marketplace’s” OS2″ relaunch, which includes support for fungible token trading alongside NFTs. But why now?

” We really took a step back with this rebuild and we said: We want to build long-term for our community. We want to be much more crypto-native”, Finzer told We want to have a platform that feels, lives, and breathes Web3, and having a token as a part of that seemed like the right thing to do over the long run for our users and the NFT ecosystem participants.

Prior to now, traders received tokens from rival NFT platforms like Blur and Magic Eden. But despite excitement from recipients on airdrop day, those tokens have trended down, and now trade for substantially less than their all-time high prices, respectively.

When there is always something new in crypto, OpenSea will have a similar challenge to overcome when it comes to battling the quick-term attention paid to airdropped tokens.

” If you don’t have a product that people love, and you don’t have a real community, then sort of definitionally a token is going to be a short-term thing”, said Finzer. However, I believe you can take a much more long-term approach if you continue to invest in the product and design the token as a key component for its future.

OpenSea’s product investment comes to fruition in OS2, a “revitalized OpenSea” that—along with fungible token trading —will introduce an XP rewards system, an enhanced user experience, and a place to utilize the SEA token.

” It’s sort of a reimagining of every surface of OpenSea”, Finzer told The main attraction is that we are moving away from being just an NFT market and toward creating a wider platform for trading all kinds of things.

The new platform has been in a closed beta for the past few months, giving some users the chance to test the features and provide feedback along the way. Finzer claimed that OpenSea has” seen a ton of excitement” from beta testers regarding the support of a variety of token types.

OS2’s arrival is part of a broader overhaul of OpenSea in which it aims to “reinvent” the culture and the company. OpenSea ruled the NFT market boom of the past, rising to a$ 13.3 billion valuation in early 2022 on the back of hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding. But as NFT demand cooled and rivals gained steam, OpenSea faced layoffs—and an existential crisis, it appears.

” In the bull market, we became far too Web2″, said Finzer. ” Now we’re really leaning into a small, lean Web3, crypto-native team as we roll out this new product” .&nbsp,

The move is in line with a trend that prominent Web3 companies like Doodles and Bored Ape Yacht Club have made to resurrect the communities they built in 2021 by replacing the” corporate feel” that had permeated their brands as they expanded. &nbsp,

OpenSea, once the main trading platform for NFTs, has lost about 30 % of the market for Ethereum NFT trading, compared to 62 % for Blur, according to Tiexo.

However, OpenSea aims to be a one-stop shop for all kinds of token trades with rewards as the marketplace overhaul and upcoming SEA launch are underway.

” We really want to be this company that ships delightful, incredible products to users”, said Finzer. The lengthy, agonizing journey to a place where we feel like we can accomplish what was essentially “tearing everything down and starting from scratch”

” Now with this launch, we’re going to show the world who we are”, he added. ” It’s the biggest moment in our history, but it’s also just the beginning”.

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