The power of community in the crypto world (Opensea Case)

in LeoFinance2 years ago (edited)

Hi all. I haven't written any post here for a while, because I've been fully involved in the process design and creation of my new NFT collection for a few weeks, which I'm about to finish. This collection will have 10,000 unique and interesting pieces, but hey, I haven't come to talk to you directly about my new creation (which I probably will do on another occasion); Today I come to talk to you about the power of the community in the crypto world.

image.png
Image Source

Social Media in the crypto world

As people involved in this social platform that is Hive, we need to understand the power that our social actions have in all aspects of our online lives. The democratization of the Internet, Web 3.0 and the decentralization resulting from the implementation of blockchain technology in many of the applications that we use daily, are a reality that means that we users have more and more voting power and opinion in the performance of the products and services we use. Any system, platform, product or service that prides itself on being democratic and think of its users first, must pay attention to social channels; that is, they must pay attention to what users say and express about them on social networks.

And this applies to Hive, to LeoFinance, and to any page, platform, product or service that involves the democratization of the Internet. However, I am not here to talk to you today about Hive or LeoFinance, but about something that has recently happened in the field of NFTs.

The NFTs and the Social Media

The world of NFTs has caused a huge stir since last year and the transaction figures reported by principal NFT platforms in this regard (Opensea, Rarible and many others), are millionaires and amazing. This huge buzz has made more and more people enter the Universe of NFTs, especially artists such as painters, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, etc.

In the midst of this enormous stir that NFTs have caused due to their characteristics and attributes, the social factor becomes increasingly important so that everything they imply becomes increasingly relevant in the current and future world. What happened yesterday is irrefutable proof of this; I am referring to what happened with Opensea (the main platform for the creation, purchase and sale of NFTs today).

For those who are not in the context of what happened, I bring you up to date on the matter.

In OpenSea, anyone can enter to create their collections of NFTs as much as they want, which they can do through the Ethereum or Polygon (Matic) blockchain. The fact is that yesterday, the community of crypto artists and crypto creators raised huge signs of protest on social networks due to the fact that Opensea announced that it would limit its use from now on to only 5 collections and 50 NFTs per collection per wallet.

This is unusual, insane and totally unheard of, especially when you consider that the most successful NFT collections today (like those of bored apes) have thousands of Items (between 5,000 and 10,000 on average).

Such was the number of protests from users on Twitter and other social networks due to the decision made by OpenSea, that hours later they revoked the decision and published the following through their official Twitter account.

image.png

As you can see, the tweet says the following: "To all the creators in our community impacted by the 50 item limit we added to our free minting tool, we hear you and we're sorry. We have reversed the decision. But we also want to offer an explanation."

The power of the community and its voice through social networks

Those at Opensea reversed the decision and apologized, also saying they did so with the good of their users in general in mind. It appears that a large number of platform users have posted plagiarized NFTs and fake collections, and the measures was aim to avoiding these issues.

But what is clear and relevant in all this is that Opensea users have a voice and a vote on the decisions made by the platform through their opinions on social networks; and this is very important.

It is clear for all of us if a single user raises its voice and expresses an opinion contrary to what a company or platform does, his voice will not be heard; but when it comes to a community raising its voice in unison against a series of measures, then things change; and this is what happened in this case.

Beyond the fact that the measures that Opensea intended to take were fair or unfair, beyond the fact that Opensea now has to seek other choices to solve the problems that it intended to solve through its measures, there is the fact that the voice of the users has really weigh in on what happens within the platform, and this speaks highly of OpenSea.

At least is what I think, because I myself, for example (as I've already tell you) am myself creating and designing a collection of 10,000 NFTs that I intend to minting and listing to through OpenSea, and when I learned about restrictions yesterday, I was already considering publishing my collection on another platform. Luckily, they reversed the decision and I will be able to publish it quietly through OpenSea. However, despite all that has been said, I hope that Opensea team will be more careful when making such decisions in the future, because their service cannot and should not be limited in such a way, specially if they plan to remain the main platform for create, buying and selling NFTs at world level.

Please, comment your opinions on the subject discussed. There they are read!!

image.png