Hacker News Reader

Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

> The sooner Opensea dies, the better.

From my understanding of the space and the original article, it seems OpenSea will not die and this is pure wishful thinking.

View on HN

This is the dilemma in a nutshell. There are lots of incredibly smart people working in the web3 space who are aware of its limitations, but for every one of those, there are 1000 people just trying to make as much money as possible.

OpenSea could very easily die. They have momentum, but not a lot of moat. They also don't have a lot of community good will. A well funded competitor could take them down quickly.

Might not happen, but as of now it definitely could.

> A well funded competitor could take them down quickly

Ok, maybe, but that would mean they would be simply replaced by more of the same. It would not mean a return to a decentralized system.

Sure. My expectation is Coinbase will clobber them, and I'm not excited about that from a decentralization viewpoint. They will have a moat since they're also where a lot of people keep their money. Money will never have to leave the platform, which is an advantage.

There are projects in the works for decentralized exchanges. There are challenges there, but they will eventually exist. I doubt they'll ever dominate, though.

> Money will never have to leave the platform

I wonder if they even need the blockchain.

It's a fair question. They don't need the blockchain until the money/nft leaves the platform. But to keep credibility, they'll need the NFTs to show up in on-chain addresses. They may end up only doing that on-request.

The NBA TopShot collectibles work on a blockchain, though the media being traded (NBA game clips) can only be seen on the official platform and you can't sell the collectibles on any other platform. And they're their own on-ramp by taking credit card purchases for the collectibles. As things stand, there's really no good reason for them to be on a blockchain at all, and personally I don't consider them to be a real NFT. None of that has stopped them from being successful, though.

According to a Twitter employee, Twitter will piggyback on OpenSea verification for verified profile pictures. If it ships, that will be a big moat.

https://twitter.com/thesmarmybum/status/1478505321433735169?...

Not particularly. What verification means there is verifying that a certain Bored Ape is really on the "official" Bored Ape contract. It's verifying the contract address and nothing else. The NFTs themselves can be traded anywhere, there's no lockin for OpenSea there.

It's trivial for Twitter to add another contract address verification source.

Will OpenSea verify an NFT minted on a non-OpenSea platform? I had assumed the answer is “no” but I’m not 100% sure.

> It's trivial for Twitter to add another contract address verification source.

It’s technically trivial, but then they are putting themselves in a position to verify the verifiers. It seems like they are outsourcing verification because they want to avoid the overhead of deciding what a verified NFT is, which is something they would have to do if they invited in more sources.

>Will OpenSea verify an NFT minted on a non-OpenSea platform?

Yes. All the popular NFTs were minted on their own contracts, not on OpenSea.

My suspicion is Twitter will move to verifying for themselves in the long run. I get why they don't want to do it to start, but the hassles of dealing with any 3rd party will grow over time.

I found the form to get verified; it doesn’t matter where the collection was minted but you have to reach a volume threshold on OpenSea.

https://airtable.com/shr6kWzFZ4gWdYE6C

I would bet against Twitter ever entering the NFT verification game. They are already in over their head with account verification, IMHO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com