Devin Finzer

Last updated
Devin Finzer
The Rise of Decentralized Markets with Devin Finzer 15m28s.jpg
Finzer in 2020
Born1990 (age 33–34)
Education Brown University
Known forCo-founder and CEO of OpenSea

Devin Finzer (born 1990) is an American entrepreneur and technology executive. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenSea, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens. [1] In January 2022, Forbes estimated the stakes in OpenSea owned by Finzer and his co-founder Alex Atallah to be worth $2.2 billion each, making them the first two non-fungible token billionaires. [2]

Contents

Early life and education

Devin Finzer was born in 1990; his mother is a physician while his father works as a software engineer. [3] [4] Finzer grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended Miramonte High School in Orinda, California. [5] [6]

Finzer matriculated at Brown University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Mathematics in 2013. In his junior year at Brown, Finzer worked with future Figma founder Dylan Field to create CourseKick, a socially-oriented search engine for university course registration. [7] Just two weeks after the site launched, 20% of undergraduates had registered. [8] While at Brown, Finzer interned at Wikimedia Foundation, Google Cloud Platform, and Flipboard. After graduating, he took a job at Pinterest in San Francisco as a software engineer. [3] [9]

Career

Finzer co-founded two tech start-ups, including Claimdog, a personal finance app acquired by Credit Karma for an undisclosed amount. [2] At Credit Karma, Finzer became interested in blockchain technology. With Alex Atallah, Finzer developed and pitched WifiCoin, which would offer tokens in exchange for sharing access to a wireless router. The pair pitched the concept to Y Combinator and were accepted. Inspired by the release of CryptoKitties, the pair pivoted to the non-fungible token market, founding OpenSea in December 2017. [2]

After a 2018 pre-seed round by Y Combinator, OpenSea raised $2.1 million in venture capital in November 2019. In March 2021, the company raised $23 million in venture capital; four months later the company announced another investment round of $100 million making it a unicorn. [10] In January 2022, OpenSea raised $300 million in new series C funding, propelling the company's valuation to $13.3 billion. [11]

In July 2021, Finzer was listed 19th on Forbes "NFTy 50" list of most influential individuals in the non-fungible token scene. [12]

Related Research Articles

Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management.

Animoca Brands Corporation Ltd. is a Hong Kong-based game software company and venture capital company co-founded in 2014 by Yat Siu and David Kim. The company initially focused on developing mobile games, then shifted to blockchain gaming and NFTs in 2018.

Blockchain.com is a cryptocurrency financial services company. The company began as the first Bitcoin blockchain explorer in 2011 and later created a cryptocurrency wallet that accounted for 28% of bitcoin transactions between 2012 and 2020. It also operates a cryptocurrency exchange and provides institutional markets lending business and data, charts, and analytics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethereum</span> Open-source blockchain computing platform

Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-source software.

<i>CryptoKitties</i> 2017 blockchain game on Ethereum

CryptoKitties is a blockchain game developed by Canadian studio Dapper Labs. The game allows players to buy, sell, and create NFTs using on Ethereum. These NFTs represent virtual cats. The game's popularity in December 2017, congested the Ethereum network, causing it to reach an all-time high in the number of transactions and slowing it down significantly.

Cryptocurrency and crime describe notable examples of cybercrime related to theft of cryptocurrencies and some methods or security vulnerabilities commonly exploited. Cryptojacking is a form of cybercrime specific to cryptocurrencies that have been used on websites to hijack a victim's resources and use them for hashing and mining cryptocurrency.

OKX is a global cryptocurrency spot and derivatives exchange and the second biggest crypto exchange by trading volume, serving over 50 million people globally. It was founded by Star Xu in 2017, who is also the CEO as of 2023. The President is Hong Fang and the CMO is Haider Rafique. OKX is owned by OK Group, which also owns the crypto exchange Okcoin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Non-fungible token</span> Unique and non-interchangeable data

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that is recorded on a blockchain and is used to certify ownership and authenticity. It cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided. The ownership of an NFT is recorded in the blockchain and can be transferred by the owner, allowing NFTs to be sold and traded. NFTs can be created by anybody and require few or no coding skills to create. NFTs typically contain references to digital files such as artworks, photos, videos, and audio. Because NFTs are uniquely identifiable, they differ from cryptocurrencies, which are fungible.

<i>CryptoPunks</i> Pioneering non-fungible token on Ethereum

CryptoPunks is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection on the Ethereum blockchain. The project was launched in June 2017 by the Larva Labs studio, a two-person team consisting of Canadian software developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson. The experimental project was inspired by the London punk scenes, the cyberpunk movement, and electronic music artists Daft Punk. The crypto art blockchain project was an inspiration for the ERC-721 standard for NFTs and the modern crypto art movement, which has since become a part of the cryptocurrency and decentralized finance ecosystems on multiple blockchains.

<i>Everydays: the First 5000 Days</i> Digital work of art by Mike Winkelmann

Everydays: the First 5000 Days is a digital work of art created by Mike Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple. The work is a collage of 5000 digital images created by Winkelmann for his Everydays series. Its associated non-fungible token (NFT) was sold for $69.3 million at Christie's in 2021, making it the most expensive non-fungible token ever.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">0x (decentralized exchange infrastructure)</span> Cryptocurrency

0x is an open-source, decentralized exchange infrastructure that enables the exchange of tokenized assets on multiple blockchains. Developers can use 0x to incorporate exchange functionality into their applications, and market makers can use 0x to create markets for cryptocurrencies and tokens. ZRX, an Ethereum ERC-20 token, is the native governance and staking token of 0x. Individuals who own ZRX can vote on protocol changes and stake their tokens to earn liquidity rewards in Ether (ETH). The project's creator and core developer is 0x Labs.

Olaf Carlson-Wee is an American entrepreneur and the CEO of cryptocurrency fund Polychain Capital, which he founded in 2016. He was the first employee of Coinbase. Carlson-Wee was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2018.

OpenSea is an American non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace headquartered in New York City. The company was founded by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah in 2017.

Crypto.com is a cryptocurrency exchange company based in Singapore. As of June 2023, the company reportedly had 80 million customers and 4,000 employees. The exchange issues its own exchange token named Cronos (CRO).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pak (creator)</span> Digital artist

Pak, formerly known as Murat Pak, is a digital artist, cryptocurrency investor, and programmer. Pak is known for creating the curation platform Archillect, an internet bot which reshares media based on user interactions with content hosted on various social platforms and for launching a platform for burning NFTs to receive tokens of the cryptocurrency Ash.

<i>Bored Ape</i> NFT collection on the Ethereum blockchain

Bored Ape Yacht Club, often colloquially called Bored Apes, Bored Ape or BAYC, is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection built on the Ethereum blockchain with the ERC-721 standard. The collection features profile pictures of cartoon apes that are procedurally generated by an algorithm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dylan Field</span> American entrepreneur

Dylan Field is an American technology executive and co-founder of Figma, a web-based vector graphics editing software company. Field founded Figma in 2012 with Evan Wallace, who he had met while the two were computer science students at Brown University. In 2012, Field received a Thiel Fellowship—a $100,000 grant conditioned on his leaving school to begin working full-time on the company. Field moved to San Francisco with Wallace, where the two spent four years preparing the software for its first public release in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ERC-721</span> A technical standard for NFTs

The ERC-721 Non-fungible Token Standard, is a technical framework, defining a set of rules and interfaces for creating and managing unique, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain. ERC-721 is recognized for formalizing the concept of an NFT and establishing the foundation of the multi-billion dollar digital collectibles eco-system that emerged alongside its adoption. It is one of the most widely used NFT standards across use cases and has been utilized in various high profile projects.

William "Will" Entriken, also known by the online moniker Fulldecent, is a solutions architect, cybersecurity specialist, financial analyst, general manager, and civic hacker best known for his contributions in blockchain technology and open sourced solutions. He is recognized as the lead author of the landmark Ethereum paper ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard, published in 2018. This paper is recognized for pioneering the foundation of the digital collectibles eco-system by establishing a programming standard called "ERC-721" to create NFTs via smart contracts on Ethereum. It also first formalized and defined the term Non-Fungible Token (NFT) into blockchain nomenclature which was made popular by the blockchain game CryptoKitties; the CTO of that game, Dieter Shirley, is also a fellow co-author of the published paper.

References

  1. ↑ "Devin Finzer | Fortune NFTy 50". Fortune. Retrieved 2022-01-06.
  2. 1 2 3 Haverstock, Eliza. "The First NFT Billionaires: OpenSea Founders Each Worth Billions After New Fundraising". Forbes. Retrieved 2022-01-06.
  3. 1 2 "Show of 12-18-2021 | Techtalk, Profiles in IT: Devin Finzer". Archived from the original on 2022-01-06. Retrieved 2022-01-06.
  4. ↑ Kauflin, Jeff. "What Every Crypto Buyer Should Know About OpenSea, The King Of The NFT Market". Forbes. Retrieved 2022-01-22.
  5. ↑ "Miramonte grads leave behind climate change lessons". East Bay Times. 2009-08-28. Retrieved 2022-01-07.
  6. ↑ "California Climate Champions: Project Carpool | Climate Watch | KQED Science". 17 July 2009. Retrieved 2022-01-07.
  7. ↑ "New course tool links to Facebook". The Brown Daily Herald. Retrieved 2022-01-06.
  8. ↑ "CourseKick revamps post-registration". The Brown Daily Herald. Retrieved 2022-01-06.
  9. ↑ "A Crypto World". www.brownalumnimagazine.com. Retrieved 2022-01-06.
  10. ↑ Matney, Lucas (20 July 2021). "NFT market OpenSea hits $1.5 billion valuation". TechCrunch. Retrieved 29 November 2021.
  11. ↑ Isaac, Mike (2022-01-05). "OpenSea valued at $13.3 billion in new round of venture funding". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-01-06.
  12. ↑ "Devin Finzer | Fortune NFTy 50". Fortune. Retrieved 2022-01-10.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.