Here comes Friday, January 19th. As the week elapses, we can focus on the industry highlights over the past few days.
OpenSea 2.0 version unveiled by CEO Finzer
The team of the once-dominant NFT marketplace is firing on all cylinders to upgrade it up to v2.0, aimiing to improve UI and make clearer asset identification. These overhauls were announced by the platform’s founder, David Finzer, in an interview with Bloomberg.
Finzer pointed out that the focus shouldn’t just be on sales volume and treating tokens as yet another set of collectibles. Instead, OpenSea seeks to showcase compelling NFT use cases, thus providing users with a more in-depth experience of interacting with the renowned technology.
Although the platform has lost its total trading volume lead over the last month, Finzer believes the spotlight on volume can be misleading, since some marketplaces can boost user activity with native tokens artificially.
Alternatively, OpenSea now strives to better differentiate between collectibles by offering a more advanced user experience when interacting with NFTs. What’s more, the update also addresses streamlined client access to the platform’s pro features, as well as improving protection against fake NFTs and malicious phishing URLs.
Finzer has been keeping track of the rising usage of the Solana blockchain for NFTs, as well as the surging popularity of Bitcoin Ordinals, but recognized Ethereum as a keystone for NFT development. He emphasized the importance of Layer-2 chains which offer more accessible and speedier transactions.
Let us remind you that back in November 2023, OpenSea revealed that it was slashing 50% of its workforce, and despite this, the Blur token saw a 33% uptick.
Binance burns $636M worth of BNB as part quarterly token incineration
The renowned DEX has successfully completed its 26th BNB token burn, eliminating 2.1 million coins from circulation, which amounts to 1.41% of the total token supply.
As early as 2017, the company launched a burning program to shrink BNB’s total supply to 100 million coins, accounting for half of the total number. Since 2021, the number of coins to burn are automatically determined by the Auto-Burn formula.
In the previous burning round held in October 2023, Binance took 2.14 million BNB out of circulation totaling more than $453 million. In July of the same year, the exchange incinerated roughly 2 million BNBs valued at $484 million.
As far as you remember, Binance analysts described the year of 2023 as a period when “crypto market staged a significant turnaround.”
Ripple CEO rules out IPO due to ‘hostile’ SEC
The CEO of fintech company Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, declared that they had been considering a flotation outside of the US amid the SEC’s “hostile” treatment of them, but those plans have been shelved. He shared his thoughts on the matter during his speech in World Economic Forum (WEF), Davos.
Garlinghouse himself stressed that attempting an IPO in the face of a “hostile” regulator that must approve the S-1 application doesn’t seem enticing to him. He also cited the case of Coinbase, which was allowed to go public before being sued by the SEC over reporting issues.
At the moment, an IPO is not a top priority for Ripple. Ripple CEO also referred to the current SEC Chair, Gary Gensler, as a “political liability,” and said he hopes to restructure the agency’s board in the years to come.
He noted that the company’s main focal point right now is share repurchases, and more than $1 billion has already been poured into that program. Garlinghouse highlighted the value of providing liquidity to shareholders.