NFT marketplace OpenSea moves to Seaport protocol in effort to reduce gas fees

OpenSea, the most popular non-fungible token ("NFT") marketplace, is transitioning to its self-developed Seaport protocol from the Wyvern protocol in an effort to reduce gas costs, according to a blog post released on Tuesday. Seaport is open source and designed to be accessible for all builders, creators and collectors of NFTs. It's "a game changer, it’s open source, inherently decentralized and a modern foundation that will help us (and any teams using it) build and release new features more quickly,” OpenSea said. OpenSea created the first version of the protocol, which could lower gas fees by 35% for transactions, the blog read. Furthermore, based on last year's data, the switch to Seaport could save users $460M in the next year, as well as exempt new users from paying an account initialization fee. Note that "gas" is the fee required to conduct a transaction on the ethereum (ETH-USD) blockchain. The move comes after