OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces, has redesigned its profile and collections pages with the goal of making the site easier to navigate and making the actual NFTs themselves the center of attention. In an announcement post on Thursday, the company says these redesigns are “just the start” of the company’s work to refine how its site works.
In my opinion, OpenSea’s refreshed profile pages look a bit like Twitter and Etsy’s. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. The old version could be a bit tricky to navigate at times, and it seems like the marketplace has smoothed out some of the edges.
The newly-designed Profile and Collection pages make it easier than ever to navigate OpenSea.
Our goal is to make it easier to highlight your favorite content, find new stuff from creators you love and discover more NFTs.
— OpenSea (@opensea) May 26, 2022
The collection page, which shows off groups of NFTs, has also gotten a touch-up. It looks a bit more modern and puts less emphasis on metrics, like how many people own those NFTs and what the cheapest NFT in the collection is.
While the redesigns might be nice, they come at a bit of an awkward time. Over the past year, NFT sales have been declining, sometimes at a pretty fast clip. (To be fair, at least OpenSea didn’t choose this time to launch an entirely new NFT marketplace like Coinbase did, with painful results so far.) According to DappRadar, OpenSea’s average selling price, number of traders, and sales volume are all down since last month — though it still comfortably retains its spot as the most active marketplace in terms of dollars spent.
The NFT market as a whole has also continued its decline, according to data from NonFungible, though the picture looks different depending on how you slice it. If you’re looking at daily averages, both the number and dollar amount of sales have been declining throughout the year (despite a massive spike on May 1st when the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club launched a project called Otherside). Looking at monthly averages, sales volume is still down, but the dollar amount of sales has picked back up.
It seems unlikely that a redesign will revive the NFT market, but for those still sticking around (close to 124,000 people have used OpenSea in the past week, according to DappRadar), the experience should be a bit nicer.
