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Introducing Seaport Protocol
Seaport is a fresh new web3 marketplace protocol for purchasing and selling NFTs in a secure and efficient manner.
We're ecstatic to be working on top of it, and while we've produced the initial version of Seaport, this protocol is for all builders, makers, and collectors of NFTs, not just OpenSea.
With no contract owner, upgradeability, or other special rights, the basic smart contract is open source and fundamentally decentralized.
Seaport has been announced by OpenSea - What exactly is Seaport ?
Seaport is a decentralized protocol that allows anyone to run a non-financial transaction marketplace.
The ownership of NFTs is stored on the Ethereum blockchain (or any other blockchain that uses smart contracts), and the process is carried through using the Seaport protocol.
Because this upgrade will be open source, many people will be able to participate in this market.
Using the Seaport protocol has numerous advantages:
- Decentralization
- More options for contract optimization
- Buying and selling NFTs (instead of buying NFTs for Cryptos)
- Dutch public auctions (a strategy of selling that involves lowering the price until a customer buys)
Seaport Deep-Dive
The majority of current NFT markets only accept postings where one side agrees to provide an NFT and the other agrees to provide a payment token.
Offerers can agree to supply a quantity of ETH / ERC20 / ERC721 / ERC1155 goods — this is the "offer" — Seaport adopts a different approach.
To accept that offer, a number of goods must be received by the offerer's designated recipients - this is the "consideration."
Every Seaport listing has the same basic structure, including an updated EIP-712 signature payload that spells out exactly how much money can be spent and who will get it back.
The fulfiller, on the other hand, has a variety of options for getting listings fulfilled.
The simplest fulfillment approach is to select a single listing and create an implied "mirror" of that offering, in which the fulfiller receives all offer items and supplies all consideration things.
Seaport also allows you to fulfill many listings at once using a set of "fulfillments" - each fulfillment corresponds to a single item transfer and represents a group of offer items that the submitter can match with corresponding consideration items.
The offerers can use their coincidence of desires to complete their transfers as long as each consideration item on each listing is entirely credited after all fulfillments have been completed.
This allows for the reduction of redundant transfers (which are typically the protocol's most gas-intensive component) and the creation of new and efficient transactions.
On any listing, offerers have the option of designating both a "zone" and a "conduit."
New zones and conduits can be created by anyone.
A zone is an account (typically a contract) that performs further validation before fulfillment and can terminate the offerer's listing
A conduit is a contract in which offerers assign token approvals to each other.
The conduit's owner has the ability to add and remove "channels," and registered channels can instruct the conduit on how to transfer tokens.
These two features allow for comprehensive "opt-in" expansion and upgradeability, allowing producers, collectors, and platforms to make their own decisions about how they use Seaport while preserving broad composability with other listings on the protocol.
In addition to requiring a specific tokenId, each item on a listing can optionally indicate that some "conditions" be met, enabling collection-level and trait-level offers.
Furthermore, each item can have its own "start amount" and "end amount," which are compared to the current time, as well as the listing's start and finish times, to determine the current amount — this allows for ascending and descending amount dynamics like reverse dutch auctions.
In addition, each listing can support partial fills of offered things, in which fulfillers can choose to spend a portion of each of the total offered items and receive an equivalent percentage of each consideration item, as long as the relative ratios stay the same as they were in the initial offer.
Offerers can make standing offers to buy or sell several NFTs that share a common characteristic by combining partial fills with criteria-based items.
Open Source
For Seaport, this is only the beginning.
We created the first version of the protocol in order to enable the use cases and optimizations that creators and collectors expect from a modern web3 marketplace.
What we've truly created is a framework that will allow the developer community to collaborate on this primitive.
The Seaport protocol is neither controlled or operated by OpenSea; we will be one of many companies building on top of it.
As a result, we are all accountable for keeping each other safe as usage rises and developers create new changing use-cases.
We encourage all smart contract developers to have a look and contribute to the optimization, simplification, and review of potential security concerns.
The Seaport contracts place a premium on efficiency and include a considerable amount of assembly code. To improve readability, we've given a reference implementation that mimics the functionality of the optimized contract without using assembly code.
We strongly advise contrasting the two solutions to familiarize yourself with the code (or even as a learning tool!) and invite you to examine and raise questions directly on the GitHub project - community engagement and participation are crucial to the protocol's continued security and progress.
On that point, we're starting a two-week audit contest with code4rena today, with a prize pool of $1 million – the largest in their history!
Audits
Early in the development process, OpenZeppelin did a security evaluation of the Seaport protocol, and Trail of Bits completed an audit of the protocol near the end of the current deployment.
During either evaluation, no serious vulnerabilities were detected.
The full Trail of Bits report may be seen here.
Dillon Kellar, transmissions11, samczsun, Riley Holterhus, brockelmore, and fiveoutofnine are just a few of the great external contributors and reviewers who helped make Seaport what it is today.
For more technical details and to start diving deep into the protocol, visit the GitHub repository and the interface documentation page.
Source ; opensea Blog
Why is Seaport good for the NFT market ?
Aside from the previously mentioned advantages of Seaport, this new protocol is expected to open up the market to new entrants.
This will undoubtedly increase competitiveness in the NFT business, resulting in speedier innovation.
This will also raise the profile of NFTs, hence raising the entrance hurdles.
OpenSea is currently unavailable in a number of places around the world.
When other corporations use Seaport to enter the NFT industry, they may be able to reach out to previously closed countries, increasing demand for NFTs and raising their pricing in tandem with the crypto market.
In addition, OpenSea is hosting a two-week audit competition with a $1 million prize pool.
Any developer can audit the code and report any faults or weaknesses they find, and they will be rewarded for doing so.
For further information, simply click on this link.
