In an interview with The Block’s Gareth Jenkinson at Consensus Miami, OpenSea chief marketing officer Adam Hollander said it “makes sense” for assets such as collectible trading cards to be tokenized and traded on-chain.
Hollander argued that despite the plummeting value of profile photo collections like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks, NFTs remain an effective technology to prove ownership of digital and physical assets.
“I think it will come back,” Hollander said. “But I think if we do it, it might look a little different than what people saw in 2021 and 2022.”
According to the Dutch, previously $NFT The boom was dominated by speculative traders who were blinded by the rapid rise in the value of the dollar instead of focusing on the underlying technology.
“A lot of people who were buying NFTs weren’t buying them because they actually wanted them,” Hollander said. “They treated NFTs more like a digital casino than respecting what they actually represent.”
Hollander believes future adoption will be driven by tokenized collectibles such as Pokemon cards and Rolex watches, digital tickets, gaming items, and AI tools. He also suggested that recent advances in artificial intelligence could accelerate $NFT Lowering barriers to the creation of digital art, animation, games, and other online assets will enable their adoption.
“It’s becoming easier and easier for virtually anyone to create something great,” Hollander said.
Expansion of the open sea
He said OpenSea’s current goal is to create a platform where users can manage all their crypto assets, NFTs, and collectibles across multiple wallets and chains.
“I want to have all my assets, all my wallets, all my blockchains all in one place,” Hollander said.
He added that OpenSea is focused on simplifying user onboarding, adding fiat payments like Apple Pay, and displaying tokenized assets in dollar terms rather than cryptocurrency pricing.
“When people want to buy a $20 Pokemon card, they don’t expect that item to cost a few Ethereum,” Hollander said. “We need to be able to meet people where they are.”
Hollander also addressed the proverbial word in the room: the delay in OpenSea’s SEA token launch. He said these decisions ultimately rest with the Open Sea Foundation and that he personally had no further insight into the timeline.
“When a token launches, if it’s just a meme coin that gets issued, dumped, and forgotten about, it doesn’t really provide value to anyone,” Hollander said.
