OpenSea Shifts to Seaport Protocol in a Bid to Tackle Ethereum Transaction Fees

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Evening

World's largest NFT marketplace OpenSea has decided to move to Seaport protocol from the current Wyvern protocol in a bid to save its users from costly Ethereum gas fees.
As per OpenSea announcement, switching to Seaport protocol will save 1.8 million of OpenSea's users save 35% of the gas fees. Moreover, it will also prevent users from paying initial one time setup fees.

Seaport is an open sourced and inherently decentralized web3 marketplace, that is more efficient and allows quick deployment of upgrades. Aside for lower transaction fees, Seaport protocol offers the market place users to perform Collection Offers; more about it latter. Moreover, signatures for performing actions are now more simplified and easier to understands, helping users to avoid phishing attacks.

OpenSea estimates that based on last year's sales data , Seaport protocol would have saved $460m in gas fees for its users. And starting up with Seaport protocol, OpenSea also pushed a new upgrade called Collection Offers. Collection Offers means users can now make Trait Offers i.e. offering up NFTs with same traits. e.g. putting a trait offer for all Bored Apes with a hat. The feature is initially available for top 100 NFT collections.

The low gas perk of Seaport wont be universal. As users will have to pay one time transaction fees approving each NFT collection they want to use the new protocol and benefit from lower gas fees while selling or transferring NFTs of that collection.

OpenSea is also promising new future upgrades like Bulk Listing allowing users to purchase/sell multiple NFTs in a single transaction and adding multiple addresses for receiving funds from sales.
As far as Wyvern protocol is concerned, OpenSea will support offers and listing using the old protocol till June 21 and stop pulling contract data on June 30 meaning after that older listings using Wyvern protocol will no longer be visible on marketplace.

Although switching to Seaport protocol is a smart move by OpenSea, but whether it will be able to rejuvenate the interest of users in OpenSea market place and increasing dwindling revenues that remains to be seen.