Original author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

On March 16, OpenSea co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer tweeted that the OpenSea Foundation has decided to postpone the SEA token issuance event originally scheduled for March 30. In October 2025, Finzer first announced that SEA would be launched in Q1 2026, and with Q1 ending soon, the new timetable is still uncertain.

Finzer attributed the delay to the harsh current cryptocurrency market environment and emphasized that "SEA will only be launched once." The foundation chose to wait until everything is ready rather than rush to meet the original date.

Refund or retain rewards, users must choose one

For users who participated in the Wave 3 to Wave 6 reward activities after the Q1 timetable was announced, OpenSea proposed an optional compensation plan.

The core logic is a refund exchange for treasure rewards. Users can apply for a refund of the transaction fees charged by the platform during these rounds of activities. However, if they choose a refund, the corresponding Treasure rewards earned in the wave will be removed from their accounts. If users choose not to refund, their existing treasure rights remain unchanged, and the foundation promises to give these rights priority consideration during the TGE, and this part of the rights is independent of the distribution amount from historical activities.

This design responds to community dissatisfaction with the reward mechanism. Previously, Wave 1 distributed a reward pool of $12.2 million, including NFTs and tokens, but community feedback indicated that obtaining high-level treasure chests required extremely high trading volumes, and the reward distribution had strong randomness, criticized as subtly encouraging wash trading. OpenSea had suspended the new XP reward system for this reason.

60 days of zero fees and product roadmap

In addition to the refund plan, OpenSea announced the implementation of a 60-day zero fee policy starting March 31. The zero fee period will cover the platform's own token trading fees, and after it ends, a new fee system will be introduced. Finzer stated that the rates at that time will be more competitive for high-frequency trading users.

On the product side, although the event scheduled for March 30 has been canceled, the team will hold another event focused on product updates in the coming months. OpenSea's OS2 platform officially exited Beta in May 2025, currently supporting cross-chain token trading on 22 chains. The mobile application has entered a closed testing phase, featuring an AI trading assistant tool named OpenSea Intelligence. The perpetual contract trading feature is also on the roadmap.

NFT industry stagnates, OpenSea chooses to wait

The postponement of the token issuance reflects a shrinking industry environment. Data from CryptoSlam shows that NFT sales for the entire year of 2025 reached $5.63 billion, down 37% from $8.9 billion in 2024. Meanwhile, supply expanded to 1.34 billion NFTs, with prices dropping from $124 to $96. By the end of 2025, the total market cap of NFTs is approximately $2.4 billion.

In this context, OpenSea's market share has actually increased, but the supporting numbers are no longer from NFTs. According to The Block data, OpenSea currently holds about 71% of the Ethereum NFT trading market share, and its market share has steadily climbed since the SEA token announcement, but of the $2.6 billion monthly trading volume on October 2025, over 90% came from token trading, while NFT trading volume remained weak.

In May 2025, after OS2 exited the Beta version, OpenSea's monthly active users rose to 467,000, the highest since 2023, but as the entire market cooled, trading enthusiasm in the NFT market further diminished.

This also explains why OpenSea is eager to transform. Perpetual contracts, cross-chain token trading, and mobile applications are all attempts to find new traffic entries outside of NFTs. The SEA token was originally the climax of this transformation narrative, but its postponement now leaves the momentum for transformation hanging.

50% of the token supply is promised for distribution to the community, and after launch, 50% of platform revenue will be used for SEA buybacks. Users can stake SEA to support specific collectibles or token projects. This economic model for tokens had driven a wave of trading volume growth when announced in October 2025, but its delay may erode the community expectations built up at that time.

At the end of his tweet, Finzer mentioned that the last time the timetable was announced, "the timing was too early," creating unnecessary uncertainty. He promised that the next time the foundation sets a new timeline, it will be "thoughtful and very specific." Until then, how much confidence the community has in SEA may depend on whether this 60-day zero fee period can lead to substantial user retention growth.

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