OpenSea is a peer-to-peer marketplace. This means that buyers and sellers transact directly without any intermediaries. Nevertheless, OpenSea makes its money by charging service fees on transactions. Currently, OpenSea’s fee is 2.5% of every transaction.
Ethereum smart contracts initially powered OpenSea. The platform, however, now supports the Klaytn and polygon chains. Transactions on OpenSea are mainly carried out using Ethereum’s token Ether (ETH). The platform also supports 150 other payment tokens like DAI, UNI, and WHALE. However, you cannot use non-crypto currencies like the US dollar and Euro.
To begin using OpenSea, you would have to connect a wallet. The platform supports a couple of wallets, the most popular of which is MetaMask. It typically takes a few minutes to install your MetaMask wallet on your OpenSea account. Other supported wallets you can use include Coinbase Wallet, Trust Wallet, Portis, Venly, Bitski, and Authereum.
Once you have connected and funded your wallet, it is pretty straightforward to buy an NFT. You can simply click ‘Explore’ and browse through various options till you find something that catches your eyes. It is worthy of note that there are two main kinds of NFT listings on OpenSea. The first is a fixed sale listing where you can buy an NFT for a fixed price. Another form of listing is a timed auction, where you have a fixed period to bid for an NFT. In most cases of the timed auction, the highest bidder at the end of the stipulated period walks away with the NFT.