Why Seaport Protocol Will be the Next Standard for NFT Marketplaces

Introduction to the Seaport Protocol

Non Fungible Token marketplace or NFT marketplace for short, is an online marketplace for digital assets. NFTs can be traded with other NFTs or sold/bought via a NFT marketplace, which is a decentralized platform. NFT marketplaces are quite similar to ecommerce platforms like Amazon or eBay where different products are listed by sellers, and buyers can buy them.

During the past couple of years, digital assets has been the next big thing in the crypto world. Therefore, trading of NFTs has dramatically increased over these years. Following this popularity of digital assets, more and more NFT marketplaces has come up around the world. Opensea, Rarible are some of the most famous NFT marketplaces that you can find.

Recently there is a clear sign of emergence of more and more NFT marketplaces, and therefore the demand for expertise in this domain is increasing. However, building a fully fledged NFT marketplace is not something that can be done overnight and it requires a lot of planning and skills across various domains.

Currently some NFT marketplace platforms do not support NFTs from other platforms, many platforms have different gas fees which is needed to be payed by users and some platforms only have limited functionality.

Therefore, there is a clear need for a common standard that would make the life of developers and users of the platform easy. This is where the seaport protocol comes in. Now let us see in detail what the seaport protocol is.

1. What Is Seaport

The seaport protocol was introduced by Opensea, the world’s leading NFT marketplace. This protocol has been made opensource and can be found here. Since July 2022, Opensea has been using this new standard in their marketplace. They are also encouraging other NFT marketplace developers also to use their protocol.

Before we go into look at what the seaport protocol consists of, lets see why Opensea decided to invent a new protocol for NFT marketplaces. Before making the big shift, Opensea was using something called the Wyvern protocol in their marketplace. Wyvern protocol was also an opensource project which was funded by Opensea themselves. But with time, their codebase grew exponentially and it was hard to manage and also the gas fees for users using this platform was too high. Therefore, Opensea decided to move onto a new protocol to be implemented on their marketplace. That is how the Seaport protocol was born.

2. What Is Included In Seaport

Seaport Protocol is actually a collection of smart contracts which together act as the main logic for a NFT marketplace. It also comes with a layer of typescript code which can be used to interact with the smart contracts.

As a developer, in understanding the Seaport protocol there are three concepts that you should get your head around. They are “zones”, “marketplace” and “conduits”. These are all a collection of smart contracts that performs different tasks. The…