Can Seaport, an open-source NFT trading protocol, become a real haven for developers?

Original title: "IOSG Weekly Brief | Seaport, the beginning of OpenSea Tokenization? "

Original source: IOSG

Part.1 Insight

Seaport, the beginning of OpenSea Tokenization?

Author: Chloe, IOSG Ventures

This article is only for industry learning and communication, and does not constitute any investment reference

TL;DR

- May 21, OpenSea announced Seaport, its own open source transaction protocol, has attracted widespread attention.

- The current protocol used by OpenSea is Wyvern v2, Wyvern is an open source transaction protocol.

- Seaport realizes gas fee optimization by using Solidity assembly language, which is estimated to reduce gas by about 50%.

- Seaport is more developer-friendly and empowers developers to build their own NFT trading market.

- OpenSea will open a new trading model of NFT Easy NFT, which will effectively improve the liquidity of NFT in the secondary market.

- Open source and decentralization are the general trend of the Web3.0 era, and the NFT trading market will have more intense competition and more innovations.

On May 21, OpenSea announced the launch of Seaport, an open source NFT market trading protocol, which caused heated discussions on Twitter . Some people say that OpenSea's move aims to become the Uniswap of the NFT world, while others say that Seaport is expected to open another NFT Summer. There are different opinions for a while, and the author also takes this opportunity to discuss with you several hot spots and issues about Seaport:

- What is the protocol Wyvern currently used by OpenSea? What are the pros and cons?

- What advantages does Seaport have over Wyvern? How to achieve these advantages at the code level?

- What impact will Seaport have on OpenSea and the industry?

The superseded Wyvern Protocol

Queryed NFT transactions on Etherscan Readers may notice that there is a line of small words in the upper right corner of the smart contract overview, OpenSea: Wyvern Exchange v2. This is the protocol used by OpenSea now - Wyvern Protocol. Like Seaport, Wyvern is an open source protocol. It can be used to implement P2P transactions of digital assets, including Token, ENS domain names, land and even smart contracts themselves. Through Wyvern, developers can build their own asset trading markets on any EVM-compatible chain.

How does Wyvern implement the function of the NFT trading market? In fact, Wyvern is a smart contract. When sellers and buyers create buy and sell orders on OpenSea, these orders will be stored in a centralized database. When buy and sell orders are matched, those orders are sent to Wyvern's smart contract for on-chain settlement. Wyvern will verify that these orders are properly signed and matched, and execute the transaction.

Image source: https://victoryeo-62924.medium.com/

The ability to support an NFT market with such a huge trading volume as OpenSea is enough to prove the performance of Wyvern. However, Wyvern has its own limitations. First of all, Wyvern is not very friendly to developers and does not provide rich developer tools to help developers simplify the development process. More importantly, Wyvern has not realized the optimization of gas, which makes the transaction cost of users on OpenSea higher. Today, Wyvern has basically stopped maintaining, and related development documents and social media have stopped updating three years ago. In order to solve these problems, OpenSea announced that it will use its own developed protocol - Seaport, to replace the existing Wyvern v2.

Seaport——The real harbor for developers?

As a new generation trading market protocol, Seaport's code is open source, readers with technical background can find the source code on Github, and compare Wyvern directly from the code What is the difference between v2 and Seaport. Readers who don’t understand code can continue to read this article and learn the advantages of Seaport with the author.

The extremely high gas fee on Ethereum makes many people discouraged. The first important upgrade of Seaport comes from the optimization of gas fee. The optimization of gas fee mainly comes from the application of Solidity assembly language. Assembly language is used to define the underlying language close to the hardware. Use the most popular and simple language to explain. The bottom layer of the computer system is composed of countless 0s and 1s. When developers write codes close to 0s and 1s, the faster the program runs, the smaller the memory requirement. But for developers, the lower the language is, the more reluctant it is to touch the field, because the underlying code is very complex and abstract, and cannot be easily read. Therefore, developers prefer to write programs in a clear and easy-to-understand surface language. But because it is farther from the bottom layer, it is less efficient and more expensive to run an instruction in the surface language.

In order to reduce computing cost (difference in transmission cost between Solidity and Solidity assembly) and thereby reduce gas fee, OpenSea directly uses Solidity assembly language to develop Seaport. It is estimated that using the Seaport protocol can reduce the gas fee by nearly 50%, and the speed and performance have also been greatly improved.

Image source: https://twitter.com/drog_v/

As mentioned above, assembly language is very abstract and difficult to read. In order to improve efficiency without bringing great difficulty to developers, Seaport has upgraded the Solidity assembly language. For example, Seaport defines some constants to replace hard-to-read memory numbers, which improves the readability of the code and clears many obstacles for developers. This is the second upgrade of Seaport. At the same time, in order to ensure that there are no loopholes in the code, Seaport also launched a one million dollar prize pool to encourage developers to find loopholes and improve the security of the code.

Image source: https://twitter.com/eth_call/status/

Infinite possible future?

What are the possible changes in OpenSea after upgrading to Seaport? First of all, the gas fee of users when trading on OpenSea will be greatly reduced, and the time-consuming to complete the transaction will be shortened. OpenSea may also introduce a brand new UI to support new features such as NFT barter and combo trading. Assuming that a user wants to sell BAYC, the price can be 100ETH, or 50ETH+4 Azuki. Another example is that the user has 20 NFTs with poor liquidity. The user can choose to pack 20 NFTs to exchange for a recent popular NFT from other sellers. This method of "combined trading" and "bartering" can improve the liquidity of some NFTs in the secondary market to a certain extent.

For the industry as a whole, open source code will definitely lead to more imitators in the industry to compete with OpenSea. Therefore, in the eyes of many people, it is not a wise move for OpenSea to launch an open source protocol. In fact, we have seen similar scenarios. Uniswap imitators such as SushiSwap and PancakeSwap did steal some of Uniswap's users, but they did not shake Uniswap's leading position. The author believes that the launch of Seaport will increase OpenSea's voice in the industry and consolidate OpenSea's position in the NFT trading market. OpenSea's move is very much in line with the vision of Web3.0 - open source, to meet the challenges of the market. Decentralization and open source must be the general trend of the industry. An open competitive environment can greatly stimulate innovation. In the future, there will definitely be more innovative NFT trading markets.

What is more worth looking forward to is that OpenSea may issue coins after the launch of the open source protocol. However, most of the Tokens in the NFT trading market that have issued Tokens on the market are mainly governance Tokens, and there are not many other use cases other than voting. Such a Token model does not seem to capture value very well. Will OpenSea issue tokens? If so, how to design the token model? Will OpenSea distribute part of the transaction fees to token holders like DEX? Readers can imagine and open up discussions. IOSG has always been a staunch supporter and early explorer of Web3.0, and will continue to pay attention to and support the innovative trading market based on Seaport in the future. For more information, please continue to pay attention to the IOSG WeChat official account.

Part.2 Investment and financing event

ArtistFirst completes $5.5 million in financing led by Multicoin Capital

*Music NFT

< br>

ArtistFirst Technology Inc, a music NFT start-up company, announced the completion of a $5.5 million seed round of financing, led by Multicoin Capital, and co-founders of IOSG Ventures, Krafton, Pravega Ventures, GAMA, Woodstock Fund, Polygon Studios and Polygon Sandeep Nailwal, Gokul Rajaram, Prashant Malik and Miten Sampat among others participated.

This round of financing will be used to expand its technical team and industry partnerships, and recruit artists.

It is reported that ArtistFirst is the operator and development company of FanTiger, an NFT music platform, which helps artists create and sell music NFTs, which give fans the opportunity to communicate with artists Build a music community together and get other perks and rewards.

BUD completes USD 36.8 million Series B financing, led by Sequoia India

* Metaverse

Metaverse UGC platform BUD completed $36.8 million in Series B financing, led by Sequoia India, ClearVue Partners, NetEase , Northern Light Venture Partners, GGV Capital, Qiming Venture Partners and Source Code Capital participated in the investment. This round of financing will be mainly used for the continuous iteration of the editor and the in-depth development of the international market.

BUD was co-founded in 2019 by ex-Snap engineers Risa and Shawn and is headquartered in Singapore. BUD enables users to create personalized 3D interactive content with BUD's no-code tools.

Flowcarbon completes $70 million financing

* carbon emissions

Flowcarbon, a blockchain-based carbon credit tokenization platform, has completed $70 million in financing, including led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Samsung Next and General Catalyst, etc. participated in the financing of US$32 million, and raised US$38 million through the sale of its goddess nature token (GNT) Token.

It is reported that Flowcarbon is supported by WeWork founder Adam Neumann. The platform allows project developers to use blockchain technology to tokenize their carbon credits and carry out storage and transactions, allowing it to access lower-cost funding and scale projects faster.

Common completed $20 million in financing to build a DAO management platform

* DeFi

DeFi-focused startup Common has raised $20 million in its latest funding round, which includes Spark Capital, Polychain, Jump, Wintermute, BitDAO, etc. The new funds will be used for the further development and decentralization of its platform, also known as Commonwealth, which aims to be the ultimate community management platform for DAOs. Common allows DAOs to easily deploy governance contracts, crowdfund new initiatives, and provide chat functionality for DAO members to interact. In the future, it plans to launch an app store for DAOs, allowing each community to choose their own functionality. Common also plans to launch its own Token CMN.

Doppel Completes $5 Million Seed Round Led by FTX Ventures

* NFT Infra

NFT fraud detection startup Doppel completes $5 million in seed round, led by FTX Ventures, Polygon Studios, Solana Ventures, OpenSea Ventures, Dapper Labs, SVAngel, South Park Commons, Script Capital, Spartan Group, Paxos, 6529 Capital, Quiet Capita, and AlphaLab Capital, Balaji Srinivasan, and Gokul Rajaram also participated. The financing will be used to enhance its testing capabilities.

It is reported that Doppel provides services for detecting counterfeit NFTs and bad actors. It currently supports Ethereum, Solana and Polygon NFTs, and will soon expand to the Flow ecosystem. Doppel plans to Add more blockchains this year.

MetaKings completes USD 15 million seed round financing, with Animoca Brands and others participating

* GameFi

Web3 game studio MetaKings completes $15 million seed round financing, Makers Fund, Bitkraft Ventures, Delphi Digital , Animoca Brands, Shima Capital, WW Ventures, Spartan Group, and Huobi Ventures, among others, will use the funds raised for game development and marketing for the studio's first strategy game, Blocklords. It is reported that this massively multiplayer online (MMO) game based on medieval strategy is expected to debut next year.

ZenLedger completes USD 15 million Series B financing led by ParaFi Capital

*Crypto Taxation

Cryptocurrency tax service company ZenLedger announced the completion of $15 million in Series B financing, led by ParaFi Capital , Bloccelerate VC, King River Capital, G1 Ventures, Main Street Investment, Three Point Capital, Shorooq Partners, VaynerFund, Blizzard Fund and AngelList Quant Fund participated. Brings the company's total funding to $27 million. ZenLedger helps token holders navigate the ambiguity of crypto taxes by collecting transaction data from wallets, exchanges, and NFTs. ZenLedger currently has 50,000 users. ZenLedger plans to use the new funds to expand its team and launch new products tailored to potential clients in the registered investment advisor and CPA space.

Finnt completes USD 3.5 million in seed round financing, Y Combinator and others participated

* DeFi

DeFi application Finnt announced the completion of a $3.5 million seed round of financing, Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Untapped Ventures and others participated cast.

It is reported that Finnt is a family DeFi application that supports multi-user, high-yield savings accounts. By using digital assets and blockchain technology, it can provide global joint and savings accounts.

Cantina Royale completes $4.5 million in financing, with Animoca Brands and others participating

* GameFi

P2E shooter game Cantina Royale announced the completion of $4.5 million in financing, led by Elrond and Mechanism Capital, Crypto.com, Morningstar Ventures, Animoca Brands, Skynet EGLD Capital, GBV Capital, Good Games Guild, Chingari, etc. participated in the investment. Funding will be used to continue development and start building new features and game modes.

It is reported that the Cantina Royale game adopts the "metaverse game mode", which has independent character modeling functions and is compatible with third-party NFT collectibles. Cantina Royale uses Verko Payment system to ensure compliance with Apple and Google app store policies, allowing users to purchase NFTs directly through Apple and Google in-app purchases without hosting them on their own devices.

Elliptic Announces JPMorgan Chase Joins Its $60M Series C Funding

* Data Analytics

Blockchain analytics startup Elliptic said Thursday that JP Morgan has joined its participation in the October 2021 6000 List of investors for the $10,000 Series C round of financing. This round of financing was led by Evolution Equity Partners, with participation from SoftBank Vision Fund II, AlbionVC, Digital Currency Group, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, SBI Group, Octopus Ventures, SignalFire, and Paladin Capital Group. The Series C round brings Elliptic's total funding to date to $100 million.

Part.3 IOSG post-investment project progress

StarkWare to $8 billion Completed the D round of financing with a valuation of US$100 million, led by Greenoaks and Coatue;

StarkEx released version v4.5, supporting hybrid on-chain and off-chain data solutions Volition

* Layer2

Ethereum Layer 2 Developer StarkWare announced the completion of a $100 million Series D round at an $8 billion valuation, led by Greenoaks and Coatue. Tiger Global and some existing investors participated in the investment.

It was previously reported in March that StarkWare was raising a new round of financing at a valuation of US$6 billion, and the financing amount may exceed US$100 million. In November last year, StarkWare completed a US$50 million Series C financing, led by Sequoia Capital, which was valued at US$2 billion at the time.

Its expansion plan StarkEx released v4.5 version update, which supports Volition, a hybrid on-chain and off-chain data solution, allowing users to Choose to store data on-chain or off-chain. In addition, the new version also fully supports ERC-1155 Token, including L1 and L2 Vault.

MetaMask is Hiring a Product Marketing Manager; Partnering with Asset Reality to Help Victims Recover Stolen Crypto

* DeFi

MetaMask is hiring a product marketing manager, this position is responsible for MetaMask product marketing activities Planning, development and execution of marketing activities for related products, including market and competitive analysis, customer case studies, product positioning, key product advantages and messaging.

In previous news, Joe Lubin, CEO of ConsenSys, said that MetaMask will launch DAO soon, and confirmed that MetaMask plans to issue Token.

Metamask Wallet announced that it has partnered with Asset Reality to help victims recover stolen crypto assets. Asset Reality, experts in the investigation and recovery of stolen crypto assets, will act as a case handler and help MetaMask users around the world investigate when they fall victim to fraud.

Ethereum development platform Infura has reached a cooperation with NEAR and will expand it into a multi-chain connector

ConsenSys officially announced that its blockchain development platform Infura has established a partnership with the NEAR Protocol , the integration has been in private beta for two months and is now widely available. This marks Infura's expansion beyond Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible chains, towards becoming a connector in a multi-chain ecosystem.

1inch Foundation will allocate 1INCH TokenExtend Gas Compensation Plan; Travel Booking Platform Travala.com accepts 1INCH Tokenpayment

* DeFi

1inch Foundation announced to extend the gas compensation plan to Ethereum users who pledged 1INCH through 1inch dApp, and decided to distribute another 10 million 1INCH Token to continue the plan. The specific compensation requirements are: users who pledge 100 1INCH can get 25% Gas return; users who pledge 1000 1INCH can get 50% Gas return; users who pledge 10,000 1INCH can get 75% Gas return; 10,000 1INCH users can get 100% Gas return. Each person can return up to 10,000 USD in 1INCH Token per month.

The travel booking platform Travala.com announced that it accepts 1INCH Token for payment, and users will be able to use 1INCH Token to book more than 2.2 million hotels and more than 600 hotels in more than 230 countries Airlines and over 40,000 travel activities.

Footprint Analytics raises $4.15 million in seed funding

*  ;Data Analytics

Footprint Analytics, a blockchain analysis platform headquartered in Singapore, announced the completion of a $2.65 million Seed+ round of financing led by Matrix Partners , followed by Redpoint, A&T Capital, Hash Global, Waterdrip Capital, Lancer Capital, and Dual Epoch Capital, bringing its total seed round financing to $4.15 million after the last round led by IOSG Ventures.

It is reported that Footprint Analytics is an all-in-one blockchain analysis platform that provides visual blockchain data and analytical insights. Footprint Analytics now covers 17 chains and 100,000 Token prices, 500 DeFi protocols, and more than 1,000 GameFi projects.

The Kava 10 main network upgrade has been completed, and the Ethereum and Cosmos public chains have been launched

* Layer1

Kava announced that it has successfully completed the mainnet launch of Kava 10 upgrade and activated the Kava network's Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), and launched the Ethereum and Cosmos public chains.

It is reported that the Kava 10 main network supports users to encapsulate and decapsulate KAVA as ERC-20 on MetaMask, and more than 35 Web 3 protocols have passed Kava Pioneer plans to announce an upcoming deployment to the Kava network. At the same time, Kava launched a $250,000 mainnet cross-chain experience event.

Avalanche officially launched a new proposal in the ApeCoin community to launch Otherside on its subnet

< b>* Layer1

Avalanche initiated a proposal in the ApeCoin Governance Forum, proposing that ApeCoin DAO launch Otherside on the Avalanche subnet so that ApeCoin can pass Fast transaction processing speed, higher throughput, greater scalability and lower gas costs to support the future community development of Otherside.

In previous news, Yuga Labs considered migrating ApeCoin to other Layer1, and both Flow and Avalanche hoped to be the solution for the ApeCoin migration plan.

The referendum on Kusama No. 197 has begun, and USDT can be freely circulated in the Kusama ecosystem

* Polkadot

Around 1 am on May 25th, Kusama’s referendum No. 197 was officially implemented, and Tether was in Statemine USDT has been registered on , and the asset ID is 1984.

This proposal defines the USDT assets issued by the Tether team in Statemine as Sufficient assets. In this way, Tether can pay transaction fees, and all users (Statemine accounts) who hold, accept, and send USDT do not need to hold a minimum KSM balance to use USDT. Users can freely transfer USDT on Statemine from now on. There will be more parallel chains that will connect USDT to their own DeFi scenarios.

This proposal provides greater flexibility for holders on the Kusama network, and USDT will provide transaction power for the Kusama ecology and parachain ecology.

Cosmos development company Ignite will split into Ignite and NewTendermint

*Foundations Facilities

Cosmos development company Ignite will split into Ignite and NewTendermint, and Jae Kwon, co-founder of Ignite, will serve as CEO of NewTendermint Peng Zhong, the current CEO of Ignite, will continue to serve as CEO of the restructured Ignite.

Ignite and NewTendermint say the companies will be fully independent, with Ignite continuing to focus on the development of its flagship Emeris Portfolio Manager and Ignite CLI developer toolkit ; NewTendermint will focus on the development of core blockchain infrastructure, including Tendermint Core, Cosmos SDK and smart contract platform Gno.land.

The Polkadot parachain Astar starts the XCM function

* Polkadot

Astar Network officially announced that the XCM transfer function is now live on Astar, and users can transfer KSM + DOT to Shiden + Astar. It is reported that XCM is a common message format, which aims to be a language for communication between two systems, and aims to eliminate cumbersome bridging mechanisms.

Part.4 Industry Pulse

Immutable X releases Cairo smart contract to Help with the development of NFT projects on StarkNet; and launch a liquidity solution that can span multiple L2/L3 zk-rollups

*Infrastructure

NFT Layer2 protocol Immutable X announced that it will release a set of Cairo smart contracts to help the development of NFT-related projects on StarkNet.

Currently, its released contracts cover ERC-20, ERC-721, and royalties, among which the ERC-721 contract has been extended on the basis of the contract launched by OpenZeppelin; version The tax code selects the EIP2981 standard. Immutable X said that more StarkNet contracts will be built and added to the collection in the future, including the upcoming ERC-721 Token cross-chain bridge between Layer1 and Layer2.

Immutable X launches cross-rollup, a liquidity solution that can span multiple L2/L3 zk-rollups, which aims to bring NFT to Web3 gamers scalability and composability.

It is reported that cross-rollup will not compromise the security of Ethereum and supports users to seamlessly trade NFT between any rollup. Immutable X will initially expand to include composable smart contracts and EVM/Solidity to the StarkNet network.

OpenSea launches Seaport, a web3 market protocol for purchasing NFT

*  ;Infrastructure

NFT marketplace OpenSea has announced the launch of Seaport, a web3 marketplace protocol for purchasing NFTs. The protocol will provide a more diverse and specific NFT trading experience, and users will be able to issue NFT quotes including ERC20, ERC721, and ETH, instead of only offering ETH transactions like OpenSea currently offers.

This means that instead of listing NFTs for specific amounts of ETH, users will be able to list potential transactions for specific NFTs. For example, a user could use Seaport to create an offer to exchange a Bored Ape for a bundle containing CryptoPunk, Cryptoadz, and Uniswap’s UNI Token.

Zerion releases mobile wallet Zerion Wallet, which can mint Zerion DNA

*  ;DeFi

Zerion, a one-stop platform for DeFi, announced the launch of Zerion Wallet, a non-custodial mobile wallet, which currently supports Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, Gnosis Chain, Aurora, and Loopring 10 networks. At the same time, Zerion launched the NFT avatar Zerion DNA that can change with wallet operation activities. There are 6 attributes in Zerion DNA to reflect the user's footprint on the chain, including Gas consumption, number of transactions, DNA NFT Age, number of Tokens, wallet balance, Network balance (the last three attributes are dynamic), etc. These attributes represent the background, clothes, head and color elements in the NFT avatar. Users can mint Zerion DNA for free (need to pay network fees), and Zerion will update the user's DNA attributes externally through tools such as Opensea, once a week.

STEPN will check accounts in mainland China, and will stop providing GPS and IP location services on July 15; STEPN has reached a cooperation with Alchemy Pay and will support GMT offline payment

* M2E

Move to Earn application STEPN announced a partnership with encrypted payment solution provider Alchemy Pay. Through Alchemy Pay's encrypted payment system, STEPN's native Token GMT will be able to be used in more than 2 million online and offline merchants in more than 70 countries around the world use.

Shiti Rastogi Manghani, Chief Revenue Officer of STEPN, said that this partnership will allow STEPN users to use GMT in the real world, which in turn will drive further growth of the STEPN community and ecosystem .

Previously, STEPN announced on May 5 that GMT has integrated with the encrypted payment service Alchemy Pay to connect the fiat currency and the encrypted economy.

SpaceX will send the first encrypted satellite "Crypto1" into space

* Encrypted satellite

SpaceX will launch the first encrypted satellite "Crypto1" developed by Cryptosat in Florida on the 26th local time in the United States. Launched into low Earth orbit. This satellite will provide a physically inaccessible and tamper-proof platform in space from which blockchain and ledger applications can be launched.

Cryptosat co-founder Yan Michalevsky said that this platform is the first "root-of-trust" outside the earth and does not depend on other companies satellite. One of the most exciting applications of the module, Michalevsky added, is building zero-knowledge proof protocols.

JPMorgan uses blockchain for collateral settlement

*Other< /b>

JPMorgan is using blockchain for collateral settlement, its latest experiment with traditional financial asset trading technology. The bank’s first such transaction took place on May 20, when two of the bank’s subsidiaries transferred tokenized BlackRock money market fund shares as collateral onto a private blockchain.

JPMorgan said the move would allow investors to take a wider range of assets as collateral and settle collateral outside of market hours. In addition, the bank stated that blockchain-based collateral settlement can be used for transactions such as derivatives and repurchase transactions, as well as securities lending; in the next few months, the bank plans to expand Tokenized collateral to include stocks, fixed income and other securities. asset type.

Original link