![]() That growth has been turbocharged by headline-making milestones like the artist Beeple’s $69 million sale of an artwork at Christie’s in March 2021. As recently as January 2021, only about 7,000 users conducted transactions on OpenSea, according to crypto-tracking platform Dune Analytics this January, almost 550,000 did. ![]() It’s hard to overstate how quickly this happened. Thanks to its latest funding round, led by investment firms Paradigm and Coatue, the platform is valued at $13.3 billion, reportedly turning its founders into the NFT industry’s first on-paper billionaires (though OpenSea won’t confirm that). OpenSea processed just over $5 billion in NFT transactions in January alone, collecting a 2.5% fee on every deal. NFTs track the ownership and provenance of digital items-anything from visual artworks to music clips to a selfie with your pet turtle. Today, the wider world knows blockchain-linked artworks as NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and OpenSea is the world’s biggest marketplace for those buzzy assets. The sale didn’t involve a headline-grabbing amount of money, but the moment sent a message to the pioneers in this budding digital art world: OpenSea was a place where they could do business. The twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, early Bitcoin investors and crypto entrepreneurs, bought a blockchain-backed, pixelated portrait called a CryptoPunk-using OpenSea. They had built the platform and secured seed funding, but customers were scarce: Their company was barely keeping the lights on.īut on the last night of the fair, in the gallery’s stark white basement, the two founders caught a pivotal break. Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah had moved to New York the year before to grow their startup, OpenSea, a marketplace for blockchain-linked art, in–video game items, and collectibles. For two crypto entrepreneurs, the stakes were particularly high.
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