By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 23rd, 2024
An audit of the protocol has been performed by the Trail of Bits, and a security review has also been performed by OpenZeppelin.
OpenSea has launched a new Web3 marketplace protocol, Seaport, for selling and buying NFTs. According to the announcement, the core smart contract is open-source, decentralized, and has no contract owner or other known privileges.
“We’re incredibly excited to be building on top of it, and while we’ve created the first iteration of Seaport, this protocol is not just for OpenSea – but for all builders, creators, and collectors of NFTs,” OpenSea reported.
Based on the order of the current NFT marketplaces, the sellers usually agree to supply NFTs while the buyers on the other hand also supply payment tokens. Interestingly, the new web3 marketplace protocol takes a different approach.
Several items of ETH / ERC20 / ERC721 / ERC1155 could be supplied by the offerer. This is called “the offer”. However, the recipient must also receive several items as indicated by the offerer before accepting the order. This is called “the consideration”.
The Seaport listing is also said to include the EIP-712 signature payload.
“This outlines what can be spent and what will be received back by whom. However, there are several different ways that the fulfiller can choose to have listings fulfilled,” said OpenSea.
On any listing, offerers have the option to designate a “zone” and a “conduit”. OpenSea explains that a zone is an account that ensures that additional validation is done before fulfillment. Interestingly, it can cancel the listing on behalf of the offerer.
Conduit, on the other hand, is termed as a contract that allows offerers to set token approval. It can be specified that every item on the listing can also have some requirements met rather than demanding some token. It was further explained that each item may have a start amount and end amount. This can then be compared to the current, start, and end times of the listing.
“This enables ascending and descending amount mechanics such as reverse dutch auctions,” OpenSea explained.
In addition, Seaport supports tipping. This means another consideration item could be added by the fulfiller when fulfilling an item. This will be valid as long as the tip is not more than the original offer.
According to the developers, this is just the beginning of the protocol as the initial plan was to expose the use cases and optimization expected by creators and collectors from a modern web3 marketplace. It was further disclosed that OpenSea will not be the sole controller of the protocol, but will be among many developers keeping each other safe. Also, there is a Github project, an ongoing community engagement, and participation. People are, therefore, advised to review and ask questions to improve security and its evolution.
An audit of the protocol has been performed by the Trail of Bits, and a security review has also been performed by OpenZeppelin. From these, no vulnerability was reported. As part of its plans, OpenSea is also starting a two-week audit contest with a $1 million prize pool.