Key takeaways:
- OpenSea has bought a popular NFT aggregator Gem to enhance its trading features and provide a better experience for advanced investors
- Gem allows investors to find the best NFT deals across a number of marketplaces and boasts low trading fees
- According to OpenSea, Gem will continue to operate as a standalone product and brand following the acquisition
OpenSea is looking to Gem’s expertise to improve its NFT offering
The largest non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace in the world, OpenSea, announced on Monday the acquisition of Gem, a leading NFT marketplace aggregator. OpenSea shared the news of the acquisition on Twitter.
In just a few months, the Gem team has managed to build an active community of digital item collectors that can make use of the advanced NFT trading features the platform offers.
Gem allows traders to search for the best deals across a multitude of NFT marketplaces, including OpenSea, Rarible, and Larva Labs, to name a few. Arguably the most popular feature of the Gem platform is the ability to buy NFTs in bulk while paying a single transaction fee. In addition, traders can use their ERC20 tokens to pay for gas, which can result in considerably lower fees than buying NFTs directly from the marketplaces they are listed on.
According to a Monday blog post, OpenSea is looking to implement the best features of Gem into its own platform and provide its advanced users with more flexibility when trading digital collectibles. OpenSea wrote in a statement:
“The acquisition will provide Gem with resources to accelerate their product vision and roadmap. It will also allow us to learn from Gem’s expertise and intuition about the advanced NFT community – and bring the best of Gem’s features to OpenSea.”
OpenSea added that the acquisition deal will have no direct impact on Gem going forward, as the company will continue to operate “independently” and as a “stand-alone product and brand.”
Per DappRadar data, OpenSea is by far the largest NFT marketplace in the sector, with more than 215,000 traders and over $850 million in trading volume in the last 7 days. The company is currently valued at $13.3 billion, thanks to January’s $300 million funding round that was led by the investment firms Paradigm and Coatue Management.
