OpenSea teases direct FIAT payments as competitor marketplace goes live

Leading NFT marketplace OpenSea has teased its 500k strong userbase with a cryptic tweet revealing that direct fiat payments and profile customisations will “be here real soon”.

OpenSea unveiled a new promotional video in tweet that gives new NFT users a quick and easy walkthrough of the platform.

However, what really caught the NFT community’s eye was a follow-up tweet that revealed the much-requested features on OpenSea will be released soon.

The move would make OpenSea the second major NFT marketplace to enable direct fiat payments for digital artwork – a move that could make its already dominant market share almost unassailable to the remainder of the competition.

Gemini-owned Nifty Gateway is currently the only NFT marketplace to offer direct FIAT payments due to its affiliation with Gemini.

Much like Gemini, FTX’s upcoming native marketplace may also offer fiat payments for NFTs due to the exchange’s ability to handle fiat  deposits and payments.

Despite increasing competition from SuperRare and Rarible, OpenSea remains the dominant force in the NFT space. The platform has currently done has close to $1bn in trading volume for October already and total unique users over time have peaked to an incredible 520k.

The introduction of fiat payments would allow newcomers to skip the often arduous task of moving Ether (ETH) from an exchange to a Web3 wallet and then purchasing the NFT – a process that often incurs fees and costs that may put newcomers off.

The introductory video and fiat payments reveal come hours after the launch of competitor marketplace Infinity, which unveiled its community-driven, decentralised marketplace to the NFT masses.

The marketplace – which has adopted the slogan the “FTX of NFTs”- was developed as an ‘alternative’ to OpenSea and aims to “better represent, as well as incorporate the needs and wants of the NFT community”.

Most interestingly, Infinity reuses OpenSea’s smart contracts and introduces no ‘new smart contract risk’ to consumers.

This means that current OpenSea users will pay no gas fees to list NFTs as their tokens and wallets have already been approved.

In a further bid to compete with OpenSea’s lack of a utility token, Infinity is planning on eating into its commanding market share via an airdrop of its native governance token $NFT.

The token will hand holders direct control of the app and treasury to a DAO, which is controlled by users.