One of the world’s biggest NFT marketplaces will soon begin minting on Tezos (XTZ)

What is OpenSea?

OpenSea is an NFT marketplace with the highest monthly volume in the industry. So far, it only supported Ethereum-based NFT’s, but that’s about to change. OpenSea has just announced it will enable Tezos-based FA2 NFTs on their platform.

This means that NFT’s minted on Tezos will be able to be stored, viewed, and traded on OpenSea.

Currently, you can mint NFT’s on the Tezos-based minting platform OpenMinter. Another option to mint NFT’s on Tezos is through Hicetnunc (video tutorial here). A third option called Kalamint, will go live the 18th of this month.

Kalamint is a full NFT platform for minting and trading NFT’s. A bridge that enables you to move your Ethereum NFT’s to Tezos will also be launched soon by BenderLabs.

You should check out @BenderLabs_ , they are launching their Ethereum to Tezos bridge very soon with 20 assets. In addition, they will be implementing ethereum NFTs as well.

— Tezos Commons (@TezosCommons) February 8, 2021

Why mint on Tezos?

Tezos’ transaction fees are on average over 3,000 times cheaper than on Ethereum. So minting on Tezos is a great step forward for anyone who wants to mint quality NFT’s in an affordable way.

Minting an NFT on Ethereum can cost as much as $20-$50, however with Hicetnunc on Tezos for example the cost is closer to $0.019, a 2361x reduction on the $50 price.

Then you have transfer fees for the NFTs; currently, on Tezos, the transfer price for an NFT is around $0.01 on Hicetnunc.

This makes the cross transfers well worth the effort, especially on high fee days that are more and more common lately. Last week the difference was even more astounding: transactions on Tezos were a staggering 20,000 times cheaper.

Today, with average transaction costs of $17.43 on #Ethereum, it’s time to do the math again: #Tezos is $17.43 : $0.00088 = 19,806 times cheaper then #ETH
And on this day, we expect wrapped ETH to go live on https://t.co/gVs0KZt2bA. Built on @tezos. #DeFi

— Allen Walters (@IgnoranceIt) January 5, 2021

Fully functional PoS (Proof of Stake) also means that Tezos’ carbon footprint is a lot lower than Ethereum’s, with a fraction of the energy requirement of PoW (Proof of Work).

In a recent analysis on the energy an average NFT on Ethereum uses, it was found that a single Ethereum NFT’s total footprint was:

…equivalent to a EU resident’s total electric power consumption for more than a month, with emissions equivalent to driving for 1000Km, or flying for 2 hours.

Now there is an option to mint and transfer NFTs in a much more energy-efficient way, with no miners involved.

Now that Tezos is also connected to the largest NFT ecosystem by transactions it makes even more sense.

OpenSea has a bright outlook for Tezos

Tezos has important qualities that can be similarly valued by Ethereum’s standards. High decentralization and thus safe, secure and trustless. Tezos combines that quality with fast transactions and a high TPS (~121).

OpenSea commented:

“We also find Tezos attractive because of its under-the-radar growth in developer activity. Tezos development teams are rapidly advancing Tezos with network upgrades every three months.

This upgrade cadence is possible because Tezos significantly lowers the coordination costs of executing network upgrades in a decentralized manner at scale”.