Buyers on OpenSea, one of the world’s top non-fungible token markets, will soon be able to pay for NFTs with a credit card, debit card, or Apple Pay without owning cryptocurrency.
MoonPay, a fintech company that provides crypto payment infrastructure, announced the move on 1st April. MoonPay is also the company that has facilitated the purchase of Bored Ape NFT by a number of celebrities. The move is presumably aimed at attracting more mainstream purchasers, similar to NBA Top Shot’s tactic a year ago when the game was hot. It also comes at a busy moment for OpenSea, which has garnered a lot of attention in the crypto world in recent months.
NFTs and OpenSea
OpenSea revealed last month that its Ethereum and Polygon sales produced over $5 billion in total trading volume in January. This shattered OpenSea’s previous record, which had stood since August 2021.
The NFT marketplace also revealed this week that it will begin listing Solana NFTs later this month. Although it is unclear when OpenSea will begin offering Solana NFTs, the NFT marketplace tweeted a short teaser video describing the move as the “best-kept secret in Web3.”
Solana’s stock soared as a result of the announcement. On March 30, NFT trading volume on Solana jumped by over 80%, and the price of SOL increased by over 24%, capping a seven-day price increase of nearly 24%.
For OpenSea, things haven’t always gone well. A Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT sold for $1,700 worth of ETH in January 2022, far below its floor price at the time, thanks to an exploit on the NFT marketplace. NFTs from the Cool Cats and Doodle collections were also stolen, according to OpenSea users in February. Devin Finzer, co-founder and CEO of OpenSea, classified the incident as a phishing attack.
“We don’t believe it’s connected to the OpenSea website. It appears 32 users thus far have signed a malicious payload from an attacker, and some of their NFTs were stolen,” Finzer said at the time.
Last November, an OpenSea employee profited directly by buying NFTs just before they were featured on the front page of the website; Finzer claimed the occurrence was “misframed” as insider trading.