OpenSea: OS2 & Beyond From James Uejio - OpenSea

[Music] all right hey everyone my name is James and welcome to the eth Denver 2025 os2 and Beyond talk so I'm an engineer here at Open Sea and the point of this talk is really to peel back the layers and and peel back the curtain on open se you know I think some people feel like uh open SE is a little hard to you know um uh access and I'm here to talk through the Journey of os2 so I have a little clicker which is fun uh who am I I'm James I'm this beans on the top right jigar on all the socials um isuki was kind of the First nft Community I joined and I just love the art I love anime I love uh kind of the fitness and and music of this little beans and so it really resonated with me uh I grew up in San Francisco worked in fintech and e-commerce in New York and then got into nfts around yeah 2021 um basically when uh auki started and really the kind of the ju toos of the finance corporate you know suit and tie and the crazy D gen Discord uh just really really drew me in like I just love the culture I love the memes I love you know just trolling in in slack and not taking things so seriously and so that just like really drew me in during Co uh I also love kind of the art and these 10K generative pfps and how people can really like associate themselves with just a a picture online and so I I really associate myself with my beans and it's uh it's just something you don't find anywhere else so I tried to actually quit my job I was like fintech is too too corporate for me quit my job tried to start my own nft project uh it was like a fitness mental health nft project and had a big had a you know community of a few people and you know everywhere every country in the world and uh it was really fun it was just like that energy of people helping each other people giving each other tips and uh creating this um this uh kind of yeah Community um around Fitness and mental health that just really excited me about the space and I made a bunch of like generative animated art open source tools and it was um yeah really fun sadly the nft project didn't didn't work out but just the potential across the board just really got me excited and then I joined openc two and a half years ago I first joined the gem XYZ team so if you know the nft aggregator gem um that then turned into openc Pro I helped launch that and it was really fun to be this kind of like smaller startup inside this bigger company and I'm currently based in Los Angeles so if anyone wants to hang out and I love uh racket Sports uh tennis and pickle ball and golf and uh music so if anyone wants to hit some shows up I'm all ears so why did we rebuild this is a quote from Devin um the CEO the nft bull market changed us we got to corporate to web2 and let the fear of risk outweigh building for users and so me as an engineer I felt this when I first joined it was a big company we had many layers of management we had all these processes you had to get your code reviewed and then do this and then do that and you couldn't actually ship things quickly we were afraid to ship things because users like might not like it and then you know the data might not back it up and then you know you're just kind of stuck and in um like kind of not shipping things or not shipping quickly enough and so there was kind of this cultural rebuild we had to do at the company um where you know a big part of it also was a lot of people weren't even crypto native like they didn't care about nfts as as much as me or other people they didn't buy nfts they didn't trade nfts they didn't even buy or trade crypto and so that was a big kind of learning and uh growth that we had to do as a company and then there was the technical rebuild that we had to do there were a lot of technical challenges um from openc 1.0 we call it and openc pro openc 1.0 was this kind of Monolithic D Jango postgress like uh the CTO calls it like this Ru Goldberg machine that just like it barely works but you're very scared to do anything and then openc Pro is like this really hacky startup that we just uh had to get you know get out really quickly and so neither actually could scale to the amount of chains and volume and users that we really wanted and there's lots of memes about about that um but I think with os2 we've we've fixed a lot of those memes and then there's a lot of complexity with a marketplace with Creator Studios with uh a whole trust in safety with um yeah orders and wallet and front end back like there's a lot of complexity and it wasn't easily um decoupled in the the first open seat and it was slow it was very slow to develop it took a really long time to build things for a variety of reasons um and you know I think a lot of people might say you should just keep iterating on an existing system but when you have kind of a need for a cultural rebuild and a need for a technical one it actually makes sense just to restart so we rebuilded so this is the voyage of os2 we organized into Crews so we flatten the entire org we have about 20 25 Engineers all reporting to the CTO we organize into what we call Crews of like six people and then there's a crew lead that basically leads that crew but it's not a manager it's not it's someone who's really deep in the weeds coating building shipping doing product requirements um and you shift you shift around sometimes it's one person sometimes it's another person and that sort of agile helped us get os2 I mean build it basically within a year and um iterate really quickly and not be kind of afraid to have these rigid team structures and then we rewrote the entire back end and front end so I think uh you know I'm very proud of what the the team has done I know some openc people are watching online uh we rebuilt everything we the back end was the biggest one we rebuilt it entirely into cotlin uh and using Kafka as our kind of a message bus uh for an event d architecture we rebuilt it using and Aurora as our database and uh kubernetes kind of as the infr layer in the front end we we redid the entire front end um although the the teex stack is actually pretty similar we use the latest nex5 versel uh kind of uh bells and whistles Tailwind graphql uh wagm VM but um yeah using a shared design system component so everything looks cohesive and the same from the front end side so that was um really nice to clean up so we can build front end components faster we have a pwa now a mobile like mobile first kind of experience to trade and buy and um sell nfts on your phone and there were kind of five leading design principles that we followed one was velocity so this was can a new engineer come and actually build things quickly does it take weeks to on board or can literally someone the first week go and build and ship and post on Twitter that they shipped you know this thing and just have this really really nice feedback cycle day one and I think we did a really good job with this kind of event driven model with these uh this new rewrite that we've had people join and do exactly that and that's really exciting um to see scalability so uh our whole Northstar was 10x the chains 10x the bull market traffic 10x the orders and we built kind of all of these uh different pieces so that they could scale uh I think people remember kind of the bull market back in 21 and openc crashed every you know few days and couldn't scale and now with os2 we've actually um had pretty uh stable performance the past uh two weeks since we launched and so um yeah we're adding chains really quickly we're doing things in a scalable way performance and liveness so I think people also remember uh that you are at a you know a hot mint and the metadata is refreshing really quickly and openc the metadata hasn't refreshed or it's not live updating or someone bought something and you're trying to buy something that was already bought and so all of that kind of staleness really really affects the the user experience and just the entire like kind of um reputation of the company and with os2 we basically did like had kind of snappiness and liveliness and live updates as like a first class we built everything so that stats update activity update orders update uh your ownership updates within you know we have these strict kind of SLO uh requirements that has to update within you know 500 milliseconds or 200 milliseconds and it's unacceptable and someone gets paged if it doesn't so that's the kind of standard that we are hitting uh with os2 and then modularity how the different domains uh interact and how basically can we have these separation of concerns between these different Crews and these different uh areas of expertise and then abstracted is basically like um can we swap out things under the hood and uh rewrite different areas without breaking the entire system and we've actually done that a few times we've Rewritten parts of our stack and can just swap out pieces and that's kind of the beauty of these like microservice event driven architectures I already kind of mentioned the two main key architectures we followed Loosely I'd say uh event driven architectures and domain driven design kind of the the two buzzwords that we use internally a bunch but it's really helped us keep things clean keep things kind of a consistent architecture across it's not like some people are building this like monolith some people are building this way some people are using this um technology it's all consistent so I'd like to say there's kind of this new energy with openc and with um just myself internally is that we've ramped a lot of users up and we launched open Beta but with the alpha and with the private beta we had users come into our Discord and it's this kind of new energy internally and externally that I've I've felt and that like keeps me motivated is users come in they basically flag a bug someone goes in there uh fixes the bug tells them they flag another bug or ask for a feature we do it over and over again and slowly people actually start to realize oh yeah there's actually like an engineer on the other hand on the other end there's actually someone on the other end who actually cares enough to fix the thing that I that I flagged and so I I love that I've literally spent like I don't know like all yeah the past like six months in Discord uh the it's it's really been kind of Addicting um and that becames that kind of feedback flywheel where people uh mention uh features and then they get implemented and then they come up with something else and then there's a big community of just nft lovers and we're not like an nft project we're not like an nft like Community we're just the marketplace but there's enough people in there that are just really excited about what we're building about being a part of this future that is uh is just really motivating here's just like two screenshots of two people that basically we're talk we're like wow openc engineering team has like culturally shifted right uh we actually ship fixes and features and we are fixing user issues at like 3:00 a.m. on the holiday um and that's kind of the new model that we want to follow is that we will be there all the time to help and fix things and not be in the place where you tag open C and no one responds and your bug is is kind of lost in The Ether so what did we actually ship um we shipped os2 which is a One-Stop shop for everything on chain so this is a little bit of a different mental model it's your gateway to web 3 tokens and nfts all on one platform so that's kind of a big shift is that we have basically you can buy anime coin on the auki collection page which is just mindblowing for a auki fanboy to do is that you can Bridge your eth uh main net ethereum to um anime coin on a different chain and so that's really powerful and it's kind of these like that trend of nft communities launching tokens that you can all do it in this cohesive ecosystem we also have token Pages where you can basically buy different trending tokens on different evm chains and that's something that uh we didn't have before as well multi-chain we actually just launched uni chain nfts like an hour ago and we have 16 chains across uh yeah uni chain the most recent ones being like AP chain sonum Flo um and shape actually shape we launched two days ago as well so that's kind of the Cadence that we're like all right we're launching new Chains new chains quickly we're not going to take months to launch one chain and be fall behind we're going to be on the Forefront of some of these um some of these chains cross-chain purchasing so uh I think a lot of us feel the kind of fragmentation of the different l2s in the different chains and how can we keep that in one experience where I want to buy or mint a let's just say a um Avalanche maple story nft but I don't have any eth on that chain I don't know what these bridging things are and stuff I just want to buy it I just want that nft and you can buy single nfts cross chain and then we aggregate Marketplace listing as well we're adding more marketplaces uh I already talked about the enhanced user experience with that snappiness with that um kind of live updates and freshness and everything across there and then of course rewards I think everyone knows that we launched a Rewards program uh we have this whole XP system which is really fun where we give these shipments to people for doing various activities on the app and um and then we will We turned off uh kind of the liquidity rewards as we listen to the community but that's something that we'll be revisiting so there it is os2 a new openc but built different so what's the future hold this is really just the beginning we had to basically redo the foundations culturally and from a technological standpoint and we're adding more chains as I mentioned we're adding more tokens we are doing a bunch of cool stuff with rewards we're going to deprecate the old system so if anyone is a big openc lover let me know what features are actually missing from the new platform I will try my best to get it implemented in the next few weeks and um yeah we need your help tag me I'm jigar e or jigar in Discord and just want to give a huge shout out to the openc team people are working like ridiculous Sprint hours to get uh get this out and I'm really really happy and proud of what the team has done so yeah I'm a face to to openc you can tag me whenever you can come me I'll be hanging out we have an event uh tomorrow night as well so yeah thank you everyone