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Author: Some NFT guy
Sun Jun 29 2025
BLOCKCHAIN - I hate opening up articles by pointing out how long itt's been since I wrote an article. So I'll only do that very briefly... It's been over 2 years!!! I've been busy... But this seemed a worthwhile story to write. So here we are.
Anyway, today's story is about OpenSea, the World's Largest NFT Marketplace and how they decided to "upgrade" their platform to 2.0. From my point of view, the rollout has been a disaster.
I am writing this article now because I'm feeling quite a bit frustrated and annoyed. Frustrated because OS doesn't seem to have any interest in addressing the problems, and annoyed that complaining about it is like yelling into the wind.
What's this all about?
OpenSea is an NFT Marketplace. They exist as a platform to show and trade NFTs, as well as providing tools to creators to make their own collections and mint NFTs. They leveraged themselves in the early days of NFTs as being the top marketplace, due to the ease of use, and support for multiple chains. Not to mention the minting tools for creators.
The site was never really perfect. It had its problems. But by and large it was a good place to do business. A couple of years ago, they made some upgrades to the system that affected the way creators could use their "Studio". The biggest change for us was that all of our old collections got locked. We could no longer mint into, or edit our collections or assets. Going forward, we had to create NEW versions of our collections, and create our own contracts for each. At first, there was a lot of grumbling about this because now we suddenly had to pay gas fees to mint, something that used to be free. Not to mention that creating all new collections meant starting from scratch.
In the end, we had no choice and went along with it. Looking back on it now, I see that what OpenSea did then was actually pretty sensible, for them. Millions of people were minting into ONE contract on OS that they let everyone use. That was a terrible idea. So I see why they changed it. And it worked in our favor too. We now owned our own stuff. This all seemed well enough for a couple fo years. Until they decided it was time to release version 2.0. Or OS2, as it sometimes known.
Let's go back some 8 months ago or so
On the surface, it looks pretty cool. There are some new features. Some layout changes. But that's about the only good that I will give in this story. Once you dig even slightly deeper than that, you see where there are some serious problems. Here I will attempt to list them without just sounding like an angry rant.
You can only sell NFTs for WETH (wrapped Polygon).
What is WETH? Good question. Let me try to explain... POL is a part of the ETH blockchain. It's a cheaper token than ETH and it stands on its own. WETH is short for "wrapped ETH". Any token that runs on the ETH chain can have a WETH with it. For instance, Base, Optimism, and POL are all on the ETH chain. Each of those has a WETH, or wrapped version that serves as a bridge to ETH. This means that the value of the coin is whatever the exchage is from the parent coin to ETH. At the time of my writing this, the exchage looks like this: 1 POL is 0.000072 WETH. So if you were a seller trying to sell your NFT for .01 POL, you now have to do the conversion and sell it for .00000072 WETH. But worse, the buyer has to have some of that on hand, and then approve it for use. Which most users are not okay with doing.
If you think this is confusing, you are not alone. That confusion is the primary reason that sales on OpenSea have plummeted. My sales have stopped completely.
Anyway, they offer NO other way to put NFTs up for sale. And it's actually worse than that. POL (what was Polygon/MATIC) is not supported at all. No chain activity for POL shows on the system at all. If your NFT collection was minted on POL, you effectively cannot work with it in OS2. You can't sell for POL. You can't track sales, transfers, nothing. Now, why is this so maddening? Remember when I told you about how they made us create our own contracts for our collections? The only chains available for this at the time were ETH and POL. No one in their right mind is using ETH. These are NFTs that are selling for such tiny amounts of money, there is no way to recoup the investment of minting on ETH, and no one is going to purchase for those high prices. Just a terrible idea. SO expensive. So we had no choice but to create and mint on POL.
And now they release OS2, and it doesn't support POL. The very contracts that they railroaded us into.
I have raised this issue with OS on their Discord. Their support group simply responds with, "We have notified the dev team, and they are working on it." Right. This was months ago. No change. Nothing at all. That, in fact is one of the reasons I'm writing all this right now. Maybe some public attention outside of that Discord echo chamber will cause someone to take notice.
It wasn't so bad for a few months when we could still use OS1. Even though that system was kind of crippled and slow, at least it did what I needed it to do. Well, as of mid June, they shut OS1 down, and OS2 is the only tool to use. Which brings me to my next point...
Usability
When using a Web3/blockchain system like OpenSea, you need to connect to the site with your wallet. There are many different wallets to use. I prefer MetaMask. That was the original standard for such things. And I have like 8 different wallets with various assets in them. In order to do anything on the site, you connect your wallet, and that connection persists while you are doing your buying, selling, transferring, minting, etc... OS2 has a problem with this. It locks up, or loses the connection. Sometimes while you're right in the middle of something. And good luck getting it to reconnect. Sometimes when it does, it gives you the choice of which chain to connect to, and the box doesn't respond.
Clearing the cache, refreshing, nothing helps. You just have to shut down the browser and try again later.
NFT visibility
Here is one of the dumbest things of all. In OS1, any new NFTs that your purchase or mint, show up in your wallet as visible. Any NFTs that you receive from elsewhere, unsolicited, arrive in a hidden state. This makes perfect sense. Because when you purchase or mint, you are taking direction action that you want the NFT to be shown. When someone sends you something without your input, and it could be anything (NSFW for example), it should remain hidden until you review it and decide to make it unhidden.
OS2 does the exact opposite of this. Unsolicited stuff almost always shows up as unhidden. Things that you purchase or mint show up hidden. Exactly backwards from the way it was.
It is for this reason also, that any NFTs you had in your wallet prior to the switch are now in a hidden state, so you will have to go through them all and unhide them.
Conclusion
It is baffling to me why they did all of this. It's even more baffling to me that people have been complaining loudly about it and the team as OpenSea is completely unresponsive. Using their discord as an example, when I've initiated discussions there, many of the users respond back with things like, "I'm buying and selling all the time, it works great!" "Really, using POL?" No response. Or, "It's great for swapping tokens!" "Ok, great, but what about support for NFTs, on the Largest Marketplace in the World?" No response.
That says to me that the users on Discord are shills for OpenSea and not actual users. And the support staff that just says, "The Dev team is on it..." are just users on Discord that have been given the job of writing that stuff to people like me. Nothing is actually being done. And that particular system is NOT the direct connection to the Dev team that they claim it is.
I really don't understand any of it. Why would they cut off support for the most widely used chain for NFTs?! Especially since so many NFTs were created on THEIR system to start with. The one that they pushed us into. They ran this thing in a Beta state for many months. And during all of that time, none of the things I've written about here were addressed. The difference between what they called "Beta" and what is running now is nothing that I have been able to ascertain.
This move by them has absolutely WRECKED people's business models. Including mine. I haven't made ANY sales for over 2 weeks now. As soon as they cut off OS1, that was the last sales that I made.
I really don't know what their plan is. I don't know if they are planning to fix ANY of this stuff. In the short term, it seems pretty clear to me that I will need to find another chain and another marketplace to use. Because OS2 has shown itself to be completely unusable. And the owners are entirely too unresponsive to assume that they intend to fix that.
If you would like to support my collections, and indeed everything else I do, please visit my collections and make some purchases.
Assuming you can figure out how. Hopefully this article will help clear up some of that confusion and help bring buyers back to my collections!
#bitcoin #cryptocurrency #NFT @OpenSea #openSeaNFT
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