It’s hard to think about NFTs without thinking of OpenSea. With over 2M+ collections and $20B+ in volume, OpenSea is the largest, most trusted NFT marketplace in the world, and a huge reason that NFTs have been able to find their way into mainstream consciousness.

Our partnership with OpenSea began in early 2022. With so many users, collections and transactions relying on an efficient marketplace experience, OpenSea needed an infrastructure that could support their content, and load them fast and efficiently while offering creators and collectors a beautiful experience.

And while our partnership made sense logistically, a big reason for our successful collaboration is because just like Pinata, OpenSea believes in the power of creators. 

Building the creator’s marketplace

OpenSea has opened up a new economy dedicated to letting creators launch and freely trade their digital items. As host to some of the most popular NFT collections to date including Bored Ape YC, Doodles, CloneX and CryptoPunks, OpenSea has played a huge part in helping the world understand NFTs as a cultural phenomenon, yes, but also as a viable part of how we’ll use and interact with the Internet. And while much of this first wave has been highlighted by celebrity involvement and exclusive collections, OpenSea realizes the potential of NFTs as much greater than what most understand.

‍“NFTs represent the basic building blocks for brand new peer-to-peer economies. They give users greater freedom and ownership over digital goods, and allow developers to build powerful, interoperable applications that provide real economic value and utility to users.”

Beyond supporting individual creators, OpenSea is innovating for brands, projects and even other marketplaces to have the backend capabilities they need to push forward. A few examples include their push to remove copymints and their recent launch of Seaport, a revolutionary open source marketplace protocol for safely and efficiently buying and selling NFTs. 

You might wonder how it's possible that the world’s largest NFT marketplace can offer such massive collections and efficient transactions at scale. A large part is thanks to Pinata’s Dedicated Gateways. 

Serving content at scale with Pinata’s Dedicated Gateways

There are a few challenges that OpenSea needed to solve for in order to continue scaling and optimize their NFT marketplace experience:

1. ‍Efficiency - Being able to retrieve data at the speed at which people are used to from web2 tools and applications.‍
2. Uptime - Allowing users to access collections and make transactions anywhere at any time, regardless of device.‍
3. Space - Accessing large amounts of stored metadata without having to worry about the complexities of managing it all.

As a media platform purpose built for IPFS and web3, Pinata solves all of OpenSea's infrastructure challenges. When OpenSea needs to find media and metadata on the IPFS network, they use their Dedicated Gateway to ensure that content can be found quickly and reliably. Here’s how:

1. Pinata lets OpenSea serve content fast by requesting data from multiple locations across the IPFS network. With a built-in content delivery network (CDN) with over 200 caching locations around the world, Dedicated Gateways load content as fast as it takes to load a YouTube video.
2. Pinata’s IPFS nodes are always online. Because they are cloud hosted, Dedicated Gateways offer a reliable way to keep data available, 24/7.Keeping track of 80M+ NFTs would require a massive amount of resources.
3. With Pinata’s Dedicated Servers, OpenSea doesn’t need to invest millions of dollars into building out tooling to manage multiple servers.

As with many of our enterprise clients, a direct communication line with the OpenSea team allows us to troubleshoot, fix problems as they arise, and brainstorm new ways to delight their audience.

“We’re excited about making decentralized technology more accessible to developers and users, and Pinata embodies that mission. We’re very grateful to them for their support. -Devin Finzer, CEO of OpenSea

It’s been an incredible journey, supporting OpenSea as they’ve helped grow NFTs and the web3 industry as a whole, setting the foundation for the future of the internet. Being able to work with their team has been nothing short of inspiring, and we can’t wait to see what comes next as we continue our partnership.

What’s next for OpenSea and Pinata

We are proud to support OpenSea in their mission to build an open digital economy. For the future of web3, we share a similar goal: to build more and better on ramps and education resources for people not currently in web3. Together, we will continue finding ways to introduce web3 to a wider audience, and make the future of the internet accessible for all.

To learn more about how OpenSea is thinking of the future of web3, check out our interview with Kartik Patel, OpenSea's Head of Protocol.

Make sure to check out OpenSea’s blog to stay up to date with what they're building!

Happy pinning!

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