 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2017 |
| Headquarters | , |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
|
| Website | opensea |
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. [2] [3]
OpenSea offers a marketplace online allowing for non-fungible tokens to be sold directly at a fixed price, or through an auction.
Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah founded OpenSea in December 2017. [4] They were inspired by CryptoKitties, a blockchain-based game featuring non-fungible tokens that had been released earlier that year. [4] Finzer and Atallah believed that OpenSea could be a marketplace for buying NFT tokens like those. [4] Y Combinator accepted OpenSea into its accelerator program in 2018, [4] and in an announcement described the startup as a "peer-to-peer marketplace for cryptogoods". [5]
After finishing the pre-seed round by Y Combinator, OpenSea raised $2.1 million in venture capital in November 2019. [6]
In March 2020, the platform had 4,000 active users completing $1.1 million in transactions a month. [7] By July 2021, users were completing $350 million in transactions a month, [7] and the company was valued at $1.5 billion—meaning unicorn status—after a $100 million Series B venture round led by Andreessen Horowitz. [8] In August 2021, the value of monthly transactions spiked to $3.4 billion, and in November OpenSea had 1.8 million active users. [7]
On September 14 of that same year, Nate Chastain, the then-head of product at OpenSea, was accused of insider trading after it was revealed that he bought NFTs shortly before they were showcased on OpenSea's front page, subsequently selling them at higher values. [9] [10] The next day OpenSea acknowledged the accusations and launched an internal review. [9] On September 16, OpenSea announced that Chastain had resigned. [11] In May 2023, Chastain was convicted of wire fraud and money laundering in federal court and later sentenced to three months in prison. [12]
In January 2022, the company was valued at $13.3 billion and was described by The New York Times as being "one of the most talked-about blockchain start-ups in Silicon Valley". [13] The daily trading volume on the OpenSea marketplace reached $2.7 billion on May 1, 2022, but four months later had dropped by 99%. [14] [15]
In January 2022, OpenSea acquired Ethereum wallet-maker Dharma Labs. [16]
Later that month, OpenSea reimbursed users about $1.8 million after a user interface bug allowed users to buy more than $1 million worth of NFTs at a discount. [17] [18]
On January 27, 2022, OpenSea announced it would limit how many NFTs a user could create using the free minting tool. [19] The following day, OpenSea reversed the decision. [20] The company stated that its initial decision was based on concern about theft, plagiarism, and spam, [19] as 80% of the NFTs removed from OpenSea for violations were minted using the tool. [21]
On February 19, 2022, some users began to report that some of their NFTs disappeared. OpenSea later revealed a phishing attack had taken place on its platform via an exploit in the Wyvern Platform. [22] The next day, The Verge reported that hundreds of NFTs were stolen from OpenSea users causing a huge panic among the platform community. The estimated value of the stolen tokens was more than $1.7 million. According to OpenSea, only 32 users had been affected. OpenSea later revised its statement to note that 17 users were directly affected, while the other 15 users had interacted with the attacker but had not lost tokens as a result. [23]
In March 2022, OpenSea confirmed that it was blocking accounts in countries that are subject to United States sanctions. [24]
On April 25, 2022, OpenSea announced the acquisition of the NFT marketplace aggregator company Gem.xyz. [25]
On June 30, 2022 OpenSea reported a major email data breach had occurred when a senior engineer at an email vendor, Customer.io, misused his employee access to download and share OpenSea user email addresses with an "external bad actor." Over 1.8 million email addresses are said to have been leaked. [26] In July 2022, Customer.io revealed that five other companies were also impacted by the employee's data leak. [27]
On July 14, 2022, chief executive Devin Finzer tweeted that the company was cutting one in five of its employees. [28] [29]
The daily volume of NFT transactions on OpenSea peaked at $2.7 billion on May 1, 2022, but then dropped by 99% within four months to just $9.34 million on August 28, with daily users down a third to 24,020. [30]
| Date | Amount (millions of $) | From | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 [31] | Y Combinator, Animoca Brands | Pre-seed round | |
| November 2019 [31] | 2.1 | Multiple sources | |
| March 2021 [32] | 23 | Andreessen Horowitz, others | Series A |
| July 2021 [33] | 100 | Andreessen Horowitz, others | Series B; valued at $1.5 billion |
| January 2022 [34] [35] | 300 | Paradigm and Coatue Management, others | Series C; valued at $13.3 billion |
In December 2020, OpenSea announced that any user could mint NFTs on its platform for free. Later, in March 2021, OpenSea announced NFT collections would not need to be approved to be listed; this decision was later criticized for allowing rampant plagiarism on the platform. [36]
On September 17, 2021, OpenSea released an app for Android and iOS. The app allows for browsing the marketplace, but as of March 2023, the app does not allow buying or selling NFTs. [37] [38]
AH Capital Management, LLC is an American privately held 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.
Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work. It is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States in terms of trading volume. The company was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. In May 2020, Coinbase announced it would shut its San Francisco, California, headquarters and change operations to remote-first, part of a wave of several major tech companies closing headquarters in San Francisco in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Robinhood Markets, Inc. is an American financial services company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The company provides an electronic trading platform accessible via mobile app that facilitates commission-free trades of stocks, exchange-traded funds and cryptocurrency, as well as cryptocurrency wallets, credit cards and other banking services. The company's revenue comes from transaction-based revenues, net interest income, and subscription fees. The company has 24.3 million funded customers, 11.0 million monthly active users, and $152 billion in assets under custody.
CoinDesk is a news site specializing in bitcoin and digital currencies. Founded by Shakil Khan, the firm also provides guides to bitcoin for those new to digital currencies.
Kraken is a United States–based cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2011. It was one of the first bitcoin exchanges to be listed on Bloomberg Terminal and was valued at US$3 billion in January 2024. The company has been the subject of several regulatory investigations since 2018, and has agreed to cumulative fines of over $30 million.
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.
Video games can include elements that use blockchain technologies, including cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), often as a form of monetization. These elements typically allow players to trade in-game items for cryptocurrency, or represent in-game items with NFTs. A subset of these games are also known as play-to-earn games because they include systems that allow players to earn cryptocurrency through gameplay. Blockchain games have existed since 2017, gaining wider attention from the video game industry in 2021. Several AAA publishers have expressed intent to include this technology in the future. Players, developers, and game companies have criticized the use of blockchain technology in video games for being exploitative, environmentally unsustainable, and unnecessary.
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.
Genies is an American avatar technology company founded by Akash Nigam and Evan Rosenbaum in 2017. Genies' consumer app allow users to create fully personalized avatars to be used in apps such as Giphy, iMessage, and Instagram. Genies also offers a software development kit (SDK) enabling brands to create a branded avatar experience and online marketplace directly in their apps. The company also consists of an Avatar Agency that creates digital versions of its clients.
Sorare is a fantasy sport cryptocurrency-based video game. It was developed in 2018 by Nicolas Julia and Adrien Montfort. There are 3 sports in Sorare: football, basketball, and baseball. It is available for Android, iOS and web browsers.
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.
Solana is a blockchain platform which uses a proof-of-stake mechanism to provide smart contract functionality. Its native cryptocurrency is SOL.
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 100 million customers and 4,000 employees.
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.
Devin Finzer is an American entrepreneur and technology executive. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenSea, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens.
World Network, originally Worldcoin, is a for-profit cryptocurrency project that uses iris biometrics developed by San Francisco- and Berlin-based Tools for Humanity. Founded in 2019 by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Max Novendstern, and Alex Blania, it has accumulated $250 million in funding from venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, as well as from Reid Hoffman.
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.
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.