How to message anyone on Opensea

Opensea is a marketplace without options to contact each other. This is highly unusual and surprising to new users (and even savvy crypto users).

All popular marketplaces have accustomed us to convenient messaging systems to contact sellers and buyers in a tap. eBay, Upwork, Airbnb. Without this option, the transaction velocity and trust would be different.

Opensea does not have such a system because it (and other NFT marketplaces) is not based on accounts — usually based on emails — but on wallet addresses. How you do send an email to a wallet address?

Some projects like upcoming xmtp promise they will bring that up and maybe Opensea will actually build it. But for now there is no solution.

How would you reach me if i was not public

Well there is one and it is native to that system

Why would you need to message anyone on Opensea?

1. To exchange with the creator before a transaction
2. To obtain further details on his “proof of work”
3. To resolve a conflict if a mistake was made on a transaction
4. you may want to thank the seller/the buyer
5. To approach someone who owns/squats the ENS of your trademark. (we just did this with ZenGo)

How can you message anyone on Opensea?

Technically you cannot but this is an elegant hack in a few simple steps:

create an NFT message

1. Create an image that contains the message you want to send with a way to be contacted back “Hey I need to talk to you, DM me on twitter on @ whatever”
2. Mint that image on your opensea account. Your image is now an NFT
3. Transfer it for free (gift it) to the account you wish to contact
4. The image with the message will show in his gallery
5. Watch the magic

how to transfer any NFT to any wallet address

Limits

1. you have no guarantee he will see it or even answer. Opensea has a notification system but not for received NFTs only for sells/buys
2. It’s not free. You will have to pay a gas fee to transfer the NFT to the address.
3. This could open the gate to NFT spam. That said this is limited by gas cost to transfer the NFT

Personal story

Last week I was in a situation where I missed the bid on a private sale and someone took it by mistake. The creator mistakenly made it public instead of private. He came up with that idea above which i thought was genius. It even earned us a viral tweet which ended up on Bloomberg.

And the idea still seems to resonate with many in need of a solution

This week we realized someone squatted our ENS for ZenGo (ZenGo.eth). We could not find the registrant but we did send him a message to return it. We will see if that works

By the way, the seller never agreed to sell us back the ENS at a reasonable price and even doubled down on pricing at an insane tag just like all the squatted domains he took. We filed a DMCA request to opensea who took it down since. And we eventually bought ZenGowallet.eth and Thebestwallet.eth ENS with our new ZenGo/Wallet connect integration

Taking it one step further

Someone can make a product out of this. Here is the product requirements

1. create a web service called NFTinbox (or whatever you want)
2. Textbox for your message to type + field of point of contact
3. NFTinbox transforms that into a highly readable and impactful visual image with options of colors and backgrounds
4. connect with your wallet
5. enter the wallet address you want to transfer it too
6. pay the fee
7. NFTinbox is handling all the transfer

To build it you need to consider

1. a simple form
2. a text to image conversion with a few image templates to chose from
3. a wallet connect integration
4. an integration with opensea APIs
5. A smart contract to handle the transfer of the NFT

NFTinbox

Someone will have fun making this and will even make money on it.