NFTSCAN — the real Web3.0 infrastructure instead of Opensea’s API.
Opensea has accumulated a large amount of NFT asset data and trade data over the past four years of development, which has enabled Opensea to jump into a leading company of the NFT industry during the NFT boom period with an exclusive 97% market share of NFT transactions. For such a percentage, in any industry, it is very shocking, or in other words, it is an unhealthy industrial structure.
What happened next, we’ve just seen, is that Opensea, using its monopoly power, started to make subjective censorship of NFT projects listed on Opensea’s trading market and took down those which are not comply with its rules. Of course, we do not deny the meaning of this kind of censorship, but the censorship operation itself is contrary to the spirit of blockchain, as it destroys the openness that we all seek in the blockchain world, and may stifle innovation.
In a nutshell, Opensea is still a relatively traditional marketplace, and it does not meet the basic definition of an open and free marketplace for blockchain residents. The kind of marketplace we aspire to in the Web 3.0 era must be open and free enough.
In fact, the aforementioned monopolistic review of the trading market made by the Opensea team is not what worries us the most, it is what comes next:
Based on the huge NFT data source it has accumulated, Opensea has opened its APIs to the public. However, the API data provided to the public is incomplete, as these APIs only output NFT data for those NFT assets that are listed on Opensea’s trading market, and those that are not listed or are reviewed and removed by the Opensea team are simultaneously erased from the API output data.
This means that developers in the NFT field are forced to accept the review rules set by the Opensea team.
The relatively loose specification standard of the NFT asset protocol (ERC721\1155) makes the parsing of NFT asset metadata very complicated and tedious. No matter Etherscan or other Ethereum block browsers do not support NFT asset data well. Therefore, at the ecology level, NFT data infrastructure has been missed out for a long time, which directly increased the development cost of downstream developers and inhibits innovation power.
The development and rise of Opensea has made the whole market boiling, but its monopoly and compulsion in data level cannot meet the basic needs of developers for Web3.0 protocol or products in NFT data level. An occurrence: On the morning of December 1st, The Opensea API had an outage for several hours, which caused encrypted wallets who are using Opensea’s API unable to properly display NFT asset data for users. The impact of such downtime caused by a single data source on the downstream ecology is very serious and requires attention and vigilance!
We felt it was the time to make a change. The NFTSCAN team officially released the NFTSCAN.COM browser in September, later, launched the open API platform in mid-October: https://developer.nftscan.com/
The NFTSCAN team runs multiple Ethereum full-node servers, analysis each transaction of every new Ethereum block in real-time, filter out the data related to NFT assets and store them in the database. Till December 1, NFTSCAN has collected 35.41 million NFT assets, 25,295 NFT asset contracts, 63.92 million transaction records, and 10.74 million wallet addresses. NFTSCAN browser has surpassed Opensea in terms of completeness and resolution of NFT data. For developers, NFTSCAN OPEN API is a better choice.
Till December 1st, NFTSCAN OPEN API platform has accumulated 170+ registered developer accounts, including Mask Network, ShowMe, Numbers Protocol, Mintverse, Monaco, Litentry and other Web3.0 protocols and products, as well as BitKeep, Safepal, Coinhub , HyperPay and other encrypted wallets.
NFTSCAN’s vision is to become a fundamental infrastructure of blockchain like Etherscan, to provide industry developers a safe and stable NFT data services, and provide users with a simple and efficient NFT retrieval service.
The NFTSCAN team will continuously work in the NFT field, focusing on the data itself, at least for 5–10 years. I truly hope you can support NFTSCAN’s products and services. We always know that being recognized by the encryption community is the highest honor!
2021.12.01
Shier. Co-founder of NFTSCAN
