Inside OpenSea: From 2017 to Now Into a $427 million business
Startup Type:
Headquarter: New York, USA
Current Status: Active (private; market leader in NFTs, though activity fluctuates with crypto trends)
Founders: Devin Finzer, Alex Atallah
Founded Year: 2017
Investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Coatue Management
Funding Raised: $427 million
What Is the business model of OpenSea?
Online marketplace for buying, selling, and trading non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing digital art, collectibles, and more; generates revenue by taking a commission on each sale
How OpenSea got started?
Founded in late 2017 as cryptocurrencies enabled NFTs like CryptoKitties, Finzer and Atallah built OpenSea as one of the first open marketplaces for various NFTs, allowing creators and collectors to transact freely, and launched during the early NFT community growth
what growth strategy has OpenSea followed?
Became the dominant NFT platform by being early and supporting multiple NFT standards and collections, riding the wave of interest in digital collectibles, it secured major funding during the hype cycle to scale up and address user experience and trust/safety on the platform
what are the top products/features of OpenSea
OpenSea NFT marketplace, collection storefronts for creators, NFT item minting tools
what was the biggest challenge faced by OpenSea?
Handling explosive growth during the 2021 NFT boom – the platform experienced surges in activity that strained its infrastructure and faced issues like rampant plagiarism/scams, prompting improvements in verification and safety features