Devin Finzer | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1990 (age 33–34) |
| Education | Brown University |
| Known for | Co-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]
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]
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]
A certificate of authenticity (COA) is a seal or small sticker on a proprietary computer program, t-shirt, jersey, or any other memorabilia or art work, especially in the world of computers and sports. It is commonly a seal on paper authenticating a specific art work which and is made to demonstrate that the item is authentic.
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, with $42 billion as of May 2024.
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.
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.
CryptoKitties is a blockchain game developed by Canadian studio Dapper Labs. The game allows players to buy, sell, and create non-fungible tokens (NFTs) using 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.
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. Initially pitched as a new class of investment asset, by September 2023, one report claimed that over 95% of NFT collections had zero monetary value.
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.
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.
Stacks, formerly Blockstack, is a blockchain platform for smart contracts, decentralized finance ("DeFi"), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized apps ("DApps"). Stacks blockchain is a layer for bitcoin similar to the Lightning Network.
Solana is a blockchain platform which uses a proof-of-stake mechanism to provide smart contract functionality. Its native cryptocurrency is SOL.
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 that offers various financial services, including an app, exchange, and noncustodial DeFi wallet, NFT marketplace, and direct payment service in cryptocurrency. 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).
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.
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), often colloquially called Bored Apes or Bored Ape 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.
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.
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 ecosystem 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 (/ˈɛn.trə.kɪn/) 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.
MoonPay is a multinational financial technology company involved in the transfer of cryptocurrency. Founded by Ivan Soto-Wright and Victor Faramond in 2019, the company is based in Miami and provides payment infrastructure for cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to be bought and sold with fiat currencies.
Immutable Pty Ltd is an Australian crypto assets gaming company established in 2018 in Sydney. It developed digital collectible card game Gods Unchained and role-playing video game Guild of Guardians.