On a chilly January day, NFTs began to go missing. However, despite having clear ownership records, MetaMask and Twitter could not display photographs associated with newly contributed tokens. In the dispersed, decentralized technology stack, something had gone badly wrong.

What Is The Most Serious Problem?

In a world of solid decentralizes, a single firm has made its way into the core of almost every product. Due to a database outage, OpenSea, an NFT marketplace, could not complete transactions. As a result of the blackout, OpenSea’s image-loading API was unavailable, slowing down any service that relied on it to submit tokens. According to Vice, one user changed the company’s logo to say “ClosedSea” at the heart of the chaos.

After a year of the NFT mania, it isn’t easy to manufacture or sell a token without interacting with OpenSea. The corporate now has de facto control over enforcing community norms.

When their apes are removed, the rightful owners call OpenSea, and the platform has become a critical chokepoint in blocking the sale. It is also the largest single market whenever a token is listed. Tokens will eventually end up on OpenSea, even if they aren’t created there. Laws of physics are responsible here. Even Web3 applications that aren’t expressly tied to OpenSea are frequently reliant on the company’s infrastructure, as the outage highlighted.

Also, read – HMRC seizes NFT for the first time in £1.4m fraud case

What’s the Deal With The NFT?

The nonwovens industry finds itself in a unique situation. The foundation for a centralized service is a decentralized blockchain that is substantially more chaotic than the one utilized by OpenSea (the ability to see and trade tokens on the blockchain). While Coinbase (another significant Andreessen Crypto investment) raised $85 billion in an IPO, it’s unclear whether the same strategies will work in the wilds of Web3.0.

Representative Abram Smith, who was contacted after OpenSea refused to make officials available for an interview, emphasized the company’s lofty goals. “OpenSea promises to become a primary site for these new economies to emerge,” Smith noted when nearly everything we own is recorded on a blockchain.

Many people doubt that Web3’s decentralized future will include a platform like OpenSea, which is far removed from the scrappy token-drop attitude that has propelled the present digital art boom. Despite this, many investors and experts believe the corporation is more vulnerable than you might think. As the outage revealed, it’s hard to avoid on a technological level.

OpenSea has raised $423 million in a year

The Beeple and Bored Ape sales would take three years to kick off OpenSea’s current NFT boom, and those three years were long and cold for the company. The internal philosophy for this new generation of blockchain assets was to become “the Amazon of Web3,” which necessitated the development of functions such as purchasing, selling, and making offers.

As the CryptoKitties mania waned, NFT advocates were left looking for new applications for the technology. Finzer supported OpenSea as an alternative trade system for Gods Unchained (an early NFT-based card game) and as a mechanism to modernize software licensing as an active member of Reddit’s NFT groups. His invitation, however, went unanswered over time.

As a result, OpenSea could obtain a significant competitive advantage over its NFT competitors over those years. OpenSea took a risk by launching a brand-new online marketplace on top of a platform that had been in use for decades.