An NFT offer is a signed promise to buy at a price you choose, which the owner can accept at any time before it expires. There are three kinds. An item offer targets one specific token. A collection offer applies to every token in a collection, so any holder can sell into it. A trait offer sits in between and applies only to tokens with a particular attribute, such as a certain background or hat. On Ethereum, OpenSea offers are made in WETH, a wrapped version of ETH, and the funds stay in your wallet until someone accepts. Placing and cancelling an offer is usually free, though the first offer in a new currency needs a one-time approval that costs gas. When a seller accepts, the trade executes immediately, the seller pays the gas, and the marketplace fee comes out of the seller’s proceeds. The main risk for sellers is accepting a lowball or spoofed offer by mistake.
Listings get most of the attention on a marketplace, but offers are the other half of the market. They are how buyers name their own price instead of paying what a seller asks, and they are the number a seller can actually cash out at today. If you have ever wondered why your NFT has a “best offer” far below its listed price, or how people pick up tokens below the floor, this is how the mechanism works.
What an offer actually is
When you list an NFT, you are telling the market what you want for it. When you make an offer, you are telling a specific owner, or every owner in a collection, what you are willing to pay. Nobody has to accept. If the owner never responds, the offer simply expires.
On most Ethereum marketplaces an offer is not a transaction that moves money. It is a message you sign in your wallet that says, in effect, “I will pay this much for this token until this date.” The marketplace stores that signed message and shows it to owners. The money only moves if an owner accepts, at which point the owner submits a transaction that settles the trade on chain.
That design is why making an offer usually costs nothing. OpenSea’s guide to making offers notes that the default expiration is 30 days, the maximum is six months, and by default you do not pay gas to cancel an offer.
The three kinds of offer
Item offers
An item offer is a bid on one specific token. You open the token’s page, click make offer, enter a price and an expiration, and sign. Only the current owner of that token can accept it.
Item offers make sense when you want a particular piece, perhaps a rare token or one with sentimental value, and the owner either has not listed it or has listed it at a price you think is too high. They are also the slowest way to buy, because you are waiting on one person’s decision.
Collection offers
A collection offer is a single bid that any holder in the collection can accept. OpenSea’s explanation of collection offers puts it simply: instead of making offers on individual NFTs, you make one offer that applies to all of them. You can raise the quantity to buy more than one, and each unit can be accepted separately by a different seller.
Because any holder can fill it, the highest collection offer works as the collection’s instant sale price. A holder who wants out today can sell into it in one click without listing or waiting. This is why the top collection offer is one of the most useful numbers on a collection page, and why our guide on how to judge what an NFT is worth starts with the bid side rather than the listings.
Trait offers
A trait offer is a collection offer narrowed by attribute. You might want any token from a collection with a gold background, or any token wearing a specific hat, without caring which exact one you get. OpenSea lets you add up to two traits from different categories when the collection has trait data.
Trait offers are useful because traits often carry very different prices within the same collection. A plain collection offer is priced for the cheapest tokens, so owners of rarer ones will ignore it. A trait offer lets you bid a price that makes sense for the specific attribute you want.
Where the money sits while an offer is open
This is the part that confuses most new buyers, and it differs by marketplace.
OpenSea and WETH
On Ethereum, OpenSea offers are made in WETH, or wrapped ether, rather than plain ETH. According to ethereum.org, WETH is a token issued by a smart contract that takes in ETH and mints the same amount of WETH, always at one to one. It exists because ETH predates the ERC-20 token standard, and offers need a token that a contract can pull from your wallet with your permission. Other chains follow the same idea with their own wrapped native token.
OpenSea does not lock that WETH away. It stays in your wallet. In fact OpenSea’s developer documentation on offer limits says that with a 1 WETH balance you can have up to 1,000 WETH in outstanding offers at once. The catch is that a trade can only settle if the WETH is actually in your wallet when a seller accepts. If you spend it or unwrap it, the offer cannot be filled.
The first time you offer in WETH, your wallet asks you to approve the marketplace to spend it. That approval is a real transaction and costs gas. After that, new offers in the same currency are free to sign. Approvals stay active until you remove them, which is worth knowing. Our guide to revoking wallet approvals explains how to clean up ones you no longer use.
Deposit pools on other marketplaces
Some marketplaces take a different approach and have you deposit funds into a dedicated balance that backs your bids. Magic Eden’s escrow system on Solana works this way. You move SOL into an escrow account, and that one pool can back up to 100 offers at once. Magic Eden says the funds remain in your sole custody and can be withdrawn at any time. Blur uses a similar model on Ethereum, where bids draw on ETH deposited into its Blur Pool contract.
The practical difference is that a deposit pool guarantees the money is there when someone accepts, while the WETH model lets you bid more than you hold and relies on your balance at the moment of sale.
What happens when a seller accepts
Accepting an offer is a sale like any other, and it settles immediately. The NFT leaves the seller’s wallet, the offer amount leaves the buyer’s, and the marketplace fee is deducted from what the seller receives.
On OpenSea, the fees page sets the marketplace fee at 1 percent, and the seller pays gas when accepting an offer. If the collection has optional creator earnings, the seller can choose whether to include them. A seller accepting a collection offer for the first time in that collection will also need to approve the marketplace to transfer tokens from it, which is a one-time gas cost. For a full breakdown of how these charges stack up, see how NFT marketplace fees work.
The buyer does nothing at this stage. If your offer is accepted while you are asleep, you wake up owning the NFT. That is the point of an offer, but it also means you should only leave offers open at prices you would be happy to pay on any day before they expire.
How to make offers that get accepted
Most offers are never filled, usually because they are priced as a lottery ticket rather than a trade. A few habits improve the odds.
Check the current top offer before you bid. If the best collection offer is 0.40 ETH, a new one at 0.25 ETH will sit at the bottom of the list and no seller will see it as the best option. Matching or slightly beating the top offer is what puts you in front of holders who want to sell.
Look at recent sales rather than listings. Listings are asking prices that sellers picked. Completed sales and the offer history tell you where trades actually happen.
Use trait offers for rare attributes. If the token you want has a sought-after trait, a collection offer priced for the cheapest tokens will be ignored. Bid on the trait instead.
Set a sensible expiration. A long expiration is convenient, but prices move. An offer that looked cheap a month ago may be above market after a sell-off, and a seller will happily fill it.
Keep track of your open offers. If you have several out and they all get accepted, you need the funds to cover each one, and you end up owning every token.
Scams and mistakes to avoid when accepting offers
The risks around offers mostly fall on sellers.
The simplest mistake is accepting the wrong one. Marketplaces show offers in different currencies, and a bid in a low-value token can look like a large number at a glance. Always check the currency and the net amount you will receive on the confirmation screen, not just the headline figure.
The second risk is phishing. A common pattern is an email or direct message saying someone has made a big offer on your NFT, with a button to review it. The link goes to a copy of the marketplace that asks you to connect your wallet and sign something. OpenSea’s page on common web3 scams states that its emails always come from the opensea.io domain and that it will never ask you to deal with a middleman to complete a sale. Real offers show up in your account on the marketplace itself, so go there directly instead of following a link.
Before you sign anything to accept an offer, read what the wallet is actually asking for. A normal acceptance is a transaction that transfers one token and pays you. A request to approve all your tokens to an unfamiliar address is not. Our guide on reading a wallet signature request walks through what each type looks like.
The short version
Offers let buyers set the price and let sellers exit on demand. Item offers are for one token, collection offers are for any token, and trait offers are for tokens with a specific attribute. On OpenSea your WETH stays in your wallet until someone accepts. On deposit-based marketplaces it sits in a pool you control. Either way, only bid what you are prepared to pay, and when selling, check the currency and the contract before you accept.
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