OpenSea announced it had acquired NFT marketplace aggregator Gem for an undisclosed price. They made this move to improve the experience of their more seasoned, professional users and power traders that will buy in bulk as written in a blog post by OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer.
GEM.xyz has come to prominence lately for creating a clean and polishes (for web3) marketplace that allows users to buy NFTs from a single collection in bulk allowing collectors to package a bundle and save gas on the transactions.
OpenSea and Gem will work together closely in the future and continue to provide their customers with the products they need, but for the time being GEM will continue to operate independently from OpenSea.
gem.xyz has gained prominence recently as collectors and wallet-peepers watch momentum of projects and floors before deciding to quickly come in and sweep collections with possible upside. gem has also been complimented on their open roadmap and planned feature updates and integrations more publicly than most projects in the space. In fact, you can see (and suggest) future enhancements on their canny.io page.
Using gem.xyz to sweep floors
In addition to being able to select NFTs to package into your cart (and see the gas that you will save) the tool has one of the most impressive filtering capabilities in the space that allows collectors to filter by rarity, price, marketplace, and any number of properties that are available on a collection. Additionally, you can package other collections into a single transaction (if you choose that scenario). Here is an example of how a packaged group of veefriends series 2 nfts could be combined into a single transaction
OpenSea appears to have intentionally stayed clear of the “rankings” categories, especially the rarity calculations that have become incredibly popular with the rise of NFTs. It will be interesting to see if / when / how OpenSea will work with NFT projects to build rarity tables for NFT projects within the product vs. forcing collectors to use 3rd-party plugins, tools, or websites to find rarities that matter to them.