On Tuesday, June 14, OpenSea announced that it will be moving its platform to the newly developed Seaport protocol. The NFT platform claims that the move could save users as much as $460 million USD in fees a year, largely due to reduced transaction fees.

Today, we’re officially moving to the Seaport protocol!

We estimate the new contract will save $460m + in total fees each year. But, that’s not all ? Let’s go through the updates… https://t.co/89B1FJARnl

— OpenSea (@opensea) June 14, 2022

Seaport is an open-source Web3 marketplace protocol designed with safety and efficiency as a priority to better the experience of buying and selling NFTs. Because it is open-source, it is also decentralized by nature and allows for the integration of several new tools. Some of the tools and improvements that OpenSea plans to integrate include “significantly” lower gas costs, the ability to make offers on entire collections or items with specific traits, removal of initialization fees for new users, and increased user experience in terms of wallet signatures.

OpenSea claims that users will now save an estimated 35% in gas fees for transactions using the new Seaport Protocol. This is based on data from last years transactions, and is reported to amount to more than $460 million USD in savings (roughly 138k ETH). The removal of the setup fee for new users alone is reported to save the community an estimated $120 million USD (roughly 35k in ETH) a year.

While the savings aren’t directly put into the pockets of traders and collectors like you might see with a token airdrop — the savings means that additional liquidity will remain in the space and be spent on digital assets as opposed to being lost forever to fees.

In other NFT news, Blockchain.com offers its users free NFT domain names.