In summary
- The OpenSea Foundation sparked speculation about a possible token airdrop following its registration in the Cayman Islands.
- OpenSea 2.0, not yet officially released, has raised expectations with waiting lists and reward-focused beta features.
Three years after an NFT craze that drove monthly trading volume to billions of dollars and put the Bored Ape Yacht Club on The Tonight Show, collectible tokens are gaining momentum again, as is the popular marketplace from NFT OpenSea.
NFT trading volume recently hit a three-month high, and after marketplace competitor Magic Eden concluded its own ME airdrop, speculation is mounting over a possible OpenSea token.
The market may or may not be hinting at it, recently asking X (formerly Twitter) followers “How long have you been using OpenSea?” Many traders took it as a clever gesture toward user loyalty, typically a key metric used by platforms to determine token airdrop allocations.
The company’s biggest competitors, Blur and Magic Eden, have completed airdrops to their respective users, with the latter sending over $700 million in airdrops to users a week ago. OpenSea once led the NFT world after raising funds following a $13.3 billion valuation in 2022, but has since fallen sharply as new challengers have taken control.
Here’s everything we know about the possibilities of an OpenSea token and the speculation surrounding the event.
OpenSea Foundation launched
Most of the speculation about a possible OpenSea token airdrop comes from a recent presentation in the Cayman Islands for an “OpenSea Foundation.”
The presentation generated immediate interest among Cryptocurrency participants, highlighted by a post by the character Wale.Swoosh that garnered over 1.4 million impressions on X.
Often, cryptocurrency organizations create a foundation as a separate entity from their more established, consumer-oriented brand. Historically, these foundations become the organizing bodies that communicate and facilitate the distribution of tokens.
Although registering a foundation does not guarantee that a token will be created, other organizations that have recently provided users with tokens through airdrops have done so through their respective foundations.
Recent examples include the ME Foundation for Magic Eden or the Network Movement Foundation for the Ethereum Movement layer-2 network.
An OpenSea spokesperson confirmed to Decrypt that the foundation is indeed a registered entity, but did not comment further on any association with OpenSea.
OpenSea 2.0 previews
While many NFT traders have urged OpenSea to launch a token in recent years, speculation around a possible token peaked in November.
At the time, OpenSea opened a waiting list for a completely reinvented marketplace called OpenSea 2.0, after the one-time leading NFT platform reduced its team in an effort to be more agile and rethink its model.
“We have been quietly working on OpenSea,” Devin Finzer, CEO and co-founder of OpenSea, posted on X. “To truly innovate, sometimes you have to take a step back and reimagine everything.”
Shortly after the waitlist opened, early OpenSea 2.0 beta users began sharing snippets of new features that only fueled speculation about the token.
In a thread that received over 360,000 views on to what extent.”
OpenSea 2.0 was expected to launch sometime in December, although no update has been provided so far. To date, their waitlist has collected over one million wallets.
Traders place their bets
Although details about a token drop are unknown, cryptocurrency bettors believe the chances of an OpenSea airdrop are increasing, according to prediction markets on Polymarket.
For example, the odds of an OpenSea token announcement before the end of 2024 are now 27%, up from 9% in the last week.
Another market that allows users to bet on an OpenSea token airdrop before April 2025 is currently trading 82% in favor, following a 19% rise in the last day. So far, only $51,000 has been bet on the market.
As for the token’s success, over $2 million has been staked on Polymarket in a market predicting whether an OpenSea token will trade at a fully diluted valuation of over $1 billion a week after its launch.
Odds in the market have decreased by 1% in the last week, with traders setting the probability at 55%. The market will settle 50-50 if a token is not launched by December 31, an achievement that seems increasingly unlikely.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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