OpenSea

OpenSea never holds your NFTs or coins. Listings and offers are signed messages settled by the Seaport contract, and the help center states plainly that OpenSea "never has custody or control of your wallet assets". The risk sits in two places: what you sign, and approvals you leave behind.

Its record is mixed. In January 2022 a UI bug led to NFTs selling at stale prices, and OpenSea paid about $1.8 million to affected users. In February 2022 a phishing campaign abusing the old Wyvern order format took about $1.7 million in NFTs from 17 users. In June 2022 an employee of its email vendor Customer.io leaked 1.8 million user email addresses.

Where it does better than most rivals is theft response. On a police report OpenSea disables the item with a grey "suspicious activity" alert for up to 90 days. When Limit Break's Payment Processor V2 was exploited through old Magic Eden approvals on 25 September 2026, OpenSea said its own systems and contracts were unaffected, flagged over 3,000 stolen NFTs and showed banners to users holding the risky approval.

1. 01Use a hardware wallet or a separate wallet for trading.
2. 02Read every signature request; a listing signature can sell an item for zero.
3. 03Revoke approvals for marketplaces you no longer use.
4. 04Report thefts with a police report so OpenSea can freeze the items.

Selling means either listing at a price or accepting an offer. The first listing from a collection needs an approval transaction, which costs gas; after that, listings are gasless signatures and the buyer pays gas on purchase. On Ethereum that makes the first sale the expensive one; on Base, Polygon or Solana gas is small.

Creator earnings are separate from the 1%. Where a collection enforces them they are paid on every sale; where they are optional the seller chooses, and there is no minimum. Swap fees were cut to 0% on 31 March 2026 for 60 days, with a new fee scheme for regular users promised afterwards; the help center still listed 0% in September 2026.

OpenSea first said in February 2025 that a SEA token was coming. In mid-October 2025 Devin Finzer set the launch for Q1 2026, with 50% of supply for the community, more than half of that at the first claim, and 50% of platform revenue at launch used to buy SEA back. Users would be able to stake SEA behind collections.

The Q1 2026 date passed. The rewards programme was closed and users were offered a refund of fees paid during Waves 3–6 in exchange for giving up those waves' Treasures; the help center says remaining Treasures will be "meaningfully considered" by the OpenSea Foundation at the SEA launch. No date has been published since. The SEA market page will carry price data once it trades.

Airdrop checkers and SEA claim pages circulating on social media are a common phishing route. The only claim flow will be on opensea.io.

Partly. OS2 came out of beta on 29 May 2025 with token trading on 19 chains, and OpenSea retired the old interface (OS1) in June 2025. Swaps route through third-party liquidity. By October 2025 token trades made up over 90% of its $2.6 billion monthly volume, which is why it now describes itself as a trading platform rather than an NFT marketplace.

• Perpetuals: Hyperliquid perps on token pages, executed through the Hyperliquid protocol
• Mobile: iOS and Android app released 16 July 2026, trading across 27 chains
• Solana NFTs: supported again from 31 August 2026
• New chains in 2026: Robinhood Chain (11 July) and Circle's Arc (16 September)
• Stock tokens tradable on Robinhood Chain

OpenSea raised $2.1 million in seed money in 2019, a $23 million Series A led by a16z in March 2021, a $100 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation in July 2021 and a $300 million Series C at $13.3 billion in January 2022. It bought the wallet maker Dharma Labs and the aggregator Gem in 2022 and the wallet app Rally in July 2025. It cut about 20% of staff in July 2022.

Two legal matters shaped it. Its former head of product Nate Chastain was convicted in May 2023 of wire fraud and money laundering for buying featured NFTs ahead of the homepage; the conviction was overturned on appeal in July 2025. In August 2024 the SEC sent OpenSea a Wells notice arguing that NFTs on the platform could be securities; the SEC closed the investigation in February 2025 without action.