BNB Chain NFTs launching on Opensea marketplace

The move could provide competition to ethereum, the NFT blockchain leader

Today the market leading non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, Opensea, will begin listing NFTs from BNB Chain, one of the world’s largest smart contract-enabled blockchains, allowing users to buy and sell NFTs seamlessly on Opensea’s platform.

The move will see Opensea integrate BNB Chain into its Web3 marketplace protocol called Seaport, which will allow for multiple, real-time creator payouts, enhanced collection management and creators to avoid high gas — the blockchain-specific term for transaction fees — while cutting setup costs for new users. 

"The integration will bring a large number of creators into the wider system, as well as empower the creators and NFT initiatives inside the BNB Chain ecosystem," said Gwendolyn Regina, BNB’s Investment Director. 

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Previously, users were only able to view BNB Chain NFTs on Binance's NFT marketplace, in addition to a handful of lesser-known marketplaces, posing an interoperability issue to end users. 

The BNB Chain integration sees OpenSea increase the number of chains available to users to eight, with the Avalanche C-Chain also having recently been incorporated to the NFT marketplace.

The move could provide competition to ethereum, the leading blockchain for NFT market share, as the BNB Chain represents a cheaper alternative in terms of the amount of gas required to mint an NFT. The ERC-721 non-fungible standard adopted by ethereum can cost users tens of dollars in minting fees, of which represent the payment made to the blockchain to facilitate the minting transaction.

Representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is seen next to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of Yuga Labs "Bored Ape Yacht Club" collection displayed on its website, in this illustration picture taken Mar. 24, 2022.  (Reuters/Florence Lo/Illustration)

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Moreover, network congestion can increase on ethereum during high participation NFT events. The Otherside NFT land sale by Yuga Labs and Bored Ape Yacht Club was plagued with issues earlier in the year, as the amount of gas wasted for failed transactions allegedly reached over $5 million in total, with Yuga Labs then issuing affected users an apology and refunds as a result. Some users reported paying up to $11,000 in gas fees for one transaction. 

In contrast, BNB Chain has a much lower cost to mint, with prices typically coming in at pennies or less per NFT. The network typically doesn’t suffer the same scalability issues as ethereum, although with the new influx of NFT volume anticipated, this could be tested further.

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The news saw a slight increase in BNB price by around 1% on the 24-hour price chart, however the effects of this integration will most likely be seen when further collections are added to the marketplace, and volume increases reciprocally. The integration has seen over 100 collections added to OpenSea via the BNB Chain in the first few hours of launch, at the time of writing.