After more than 400 payouts, OpenSea’s affiliate program has started to generate some serious buzz and some great questions, so we decided to do a little promotion and clarification. In brief, our affiliate program allows users to earn between 40% and 100% of the fee that OpenSea takes on successful sales. To start earning, just set yourself up as an affiliate and add your wallet address to the ends of urls. If that sounds appealing, check out the details below.

What’s a bounty?

Bounties incentivize matchmakers to pair up sellers with buyers. Say my friend Harry Hunter knows a lady named Sally Seller (who recently listed NFT X) and a guy named Bill Buyer who wants to buy NFT X. But Sally and Bill don’t know each other. Harry can send an OpenSea link for NFT X to Bill with ?ref=HARRY'S_ADDRESS_HERE appended onto the end of it and when Sally buys the item, Harry earns between 1% and 2.5% or more* of the total sale price.

If you’re a seller and you want to learn how to leverage the OpenSea affiliate program, read on. If you’re a dapp enthusiast interested in earning bounties, skip down to the “How to refer buyers, for bounty hunters” section. If you’re a developer, we’ve got solutions of all sorts for you in the last section.

How to increase your bounty, for sellers

For sellers, it’s quick and easy to increase your chances for a sale! Just click “Edit” in the Bounties section, then drag the slider up. It doesn’t cost you anything to raise the bounty percentage — the funds for the bounty hunters come from the fee that OpenSea would otherwise collect as a fee on successful sales. The higher the bounty, the greater the incentive for bounty hunters to find a buyer for your listing.

How to refer buyers, for bounty hunters

Love trading NFTs and chatting with other collectors? Want to start earning bounties? Here’s a quick walk-through on how to do it:

1. Sign up for the affiliate program

First, go to your account page, then select the “Referrals” tab. If you haven’t signed up for an account yet, fill in the fields and click “Save.” Sign the message to confirm the information, then click “Join Now” to join the affiliate program.

2. Find a listing to refer

You can find listings with bounties by clicking the “Show me open bounties” button on the “Referrals” tab or you can browse the listings with the highest bounty percentages by selecting “Highest Bounty %” from the dropdown in the top right corner on the main browsing page. Or just make your way to a listing that you have a buyer in mind for.

3. Generate your referral link

Once you’ve selected a listing that you believe you can find a buyer for, navigate to its page and click the bounty bar at the bottom of the listing’s price detail section. Then, click “Copy” to access your referral link.

Pro tip: you can also turn any asset link into a referral link by manually appending ?ref=YOUR_ADDRESS_HERE

4. Share your referral link

Now that you’ve got your referral link, you’re ready to start sharing it on Discord, Twitter, and other social media outlets. Just be sure to maintain good etiquette; rules about referral links still apply to NFTs!

5. Get paid!

So, a user clicked your link and bought an item. What happens next?

When a buyer enters OpenSea through your referral link, OpenSea will automatically pay out the appropriate percentage of the sale price of the next item the buyer purchases. Even if it’s not the item you linked them to, you’ll get a percentage of that sale price, determined by the seller’s configuration. It’ll be paid out in whatever token the item was listed in, unless it was listed in WETH, and then you’ll receive ETH. Depending on traffic levels, payouts sometimes take 15 minutes or so to process. But don’t lose hope! Your bounty will arrive shortly.

However, you can only earn one referral from each address. The second time you refer a given user, you won’t earn a bounty. If you refer 0x1, 0x2, and 0x3, you’ll get three payments. But if you refer 0x1, 0x2, and then 0x2 again, you’ll only get two payments. If you write a blog or run a site that refers buyers to OpenSea, ask us about our preferred affiliate program! It lifts the restriction described above.

How to refer buyers, for developers

Our developer tools provide developers a powerful set of options for referring buyers en masse. Here’s a survey of the options available to developers:

1. Embed and refer in bulk

If you run a website, OpenSea makes it easy to embed a storefront and refer buyers in bulk. Just select a category from the sidebar on the left, click the “••• More” button, and select “Embed This Page” from the dropdown. When you sign up for the affiliate program and add the modal’s code snippet to your site, you’ll receive a bounty whenever you refer a sale.

2. Use the SDK to refer assets programmatically

Our SDK offers an additional level of flexibility and power to developers. To learn how to create a custom marketplace using our SDK, check out our documentation and our example dapp, the Ship’s Log. Once you’ve got a marketplace up and running, you can simply sign up for the affiliate program and feed your address as an additional parameter into seaport.fulfillorder . You’ll receive a portion of each sale you process this way.

If you’ve got questions about building a marketplace or earning bounties through your existing marketplace, please join us in the #developers channel of our Discord server. We love talking about our SDK, and we’re getting pretty good at answering questions from engineers of all skill levels.

3. Add referrals, for wallet developers

OpenSea is proud to provide information about collectibles and their owners to the top wallets in the space, like Coinbase Wallet, Trust Wallet, and Vault Wallet. If you’re building a wallet and you’re already directing users to OpenSea (like Trust and Tokenary do), sign up for the affiliate program and add ?ref=WALLET_DEVELOPER_ADDRESS_HERE onto OpenSea asset links. You’ll start earning bounties as soon as users start making purchases on OpenSea. Just check out our activity page to see how short that wait will be!

Why we’re excited

As we see it, bounties will help match up assets with the people who value them most, and that in itself is a good thing. But this match facilitating function also makes for healthier markets and communities, which is especially good for a growing space like ours.

If you’re selling NFTs on OpenSea, you’re already setting 1% bounties by default. Why not jack them up for maximum effect? And if you’re already talking about NFTs, why not make OpenSea referral links part of the conversation? Help increase the liquidity in the market and make some extra cryptocurrency as a bonus!

Plus, the affiliate program only requires an ETH address to get started, so it creates a new, low friction entry point into cryptocollectibles for newcomers. You can now earn your first cryptocurrency by helping sellers on OpenSea find buyers for their game items, art, and collectibles.

Do you have an affiliate program success story? Let us know about it on Discord, message us about it on reddit, or tweet at us. And don’t be afraid to tell us what you like or dislike about the affiliate program. Your input is priceless and we’re always happy to chat!

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*Sellers will eventually be able to configure this 2.5% figure above the OpenSea fee and referrers will be able to earn bigger referral bonuses as a result!