Want to Barter Your NFTs? Now You Can With the OpenSea Seaport Protocol

OpenSea has announced the launch of their ‘OpenSea Seaport Protocol’. Through this, instead of only offering ETH for NFTs, users can now offer different assets, such as ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155, tokens. This now offers a safe way to trade NFTs, which has been difficult to do before and has resulted in several scams.

The Details of OpenSea’s Seaport Protocol

OpenSea’s Seaport Protocol now allows for users to offer their own assets, beyond just crypto, for NFTs on OpenSea. In detail, a user “can agree to supply a number of ETH / ERC20 / ERC721 / ERC1155 items” in exchange for an NFT. This means that users will be able to barter with a combination of tokens as their payment.

Beyond this, when making offers, users can specify certain things, like traits of NFTs, that they would want if someone was to accept their offer. Additionally, the platform will support tipping, so long as the amount does not exceed the original offer.

Unfortunately, some people are slightly confused and critical of the new concept. Twitter user, @phuktep brought up the idea of taxes. They said “good luck on your taxes with trading NFTs for NFTs lol”. This is certainly a good point to make, as it may add an element of confusion at the end of the year when people are filing their tax returns. It may become difficult to discover the value of said NFTs when they are being traded.

You can see OpenSea’s full blog where they describe in detail the Seaport Protocol here.

How this will help with scams

Scams have been clear throughout the NFT space in so many ways. One of the most common ones we’ve seen has been fake trading platform links. Until now, the only way users could trade NFTs would be able to trade their NFTs for others would be through platforms like NFTrade. However, hackers would often create fake links and offer fake NFTs to scam users.

This is to no fault of NFTrade, or even the scam victims, but is more based on the smarts of hackers. Sometimes, the websites would look nearly identical, with just one character altered in the website domain name, for example, a zero would be there instead of the letter ‘o’ to trick out users.

Through OpenSea’s new Seaport Protocol, users will be provided with a safe platform to trade NFTs from a major brand. Yet, this isn’t to say that there won’t be scams, as there’s always a possibility for that, and users of course just have to remain careful and look in detail at links.