All you need to know about OpenSea

In March 2020, as Covid19 began to spread, OpenSea founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah called to test their intuition. Their five-person startup allows users to create, buy and sell all kinds of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), computer files used to track ownership of unique digital assets such as art and music on a ledger known as a blockchain. I have created a platform with, However, 26 months after launch, it had only 4,000 active users, generating $1.1 million in monthly transactions, resulting in monthly revenue of only $28,000 (including 2.5% OpenSea sales commission).

The NFT market was “feeling dead,” CTO Atallah recalls. He was on the phone in the basement of his parent's house in Colorado, where he went to work when New York was closed. In an ominous way, a direct and better competitor, Rare Bits, announced it was shutting down. The couple set a  goal of doubling their business by the end of the year, which they achieved in September. 
 

NFT: co-founders Alex Atallah (left) and Devin Finzer at their new OpenSea office in Soho. Founded in 2018, the company expects to exceed $300 million in revenue this year from less than $1 million in 2020. Sasha Oil for Forbes Finally, in February 2021, the NFT market  went crazy out of hibernation. In July, OpenSea processed $350 million in NFT transactions. That same month, in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, he raised $100 million in venture capital estimated at  $1.5 billion. At the peak of NFT  (and FOMO) hype in August, revenues jumped tenfold, from $3.4 billion to  $85 million in a month that OpenSea likely spent less than $5 million. Although the number of transactions has since dropped to around $2 billion per month, the platform currently has 1.8 million active users and a dominant market share. It has up to 70 employees and is currently looking for dozens more, including the much-needed customer service specialists. 
 

There was recently talk of another  venture capital investment estimated to be worth $10 billion. The 31-year-old CEO Finzer and the 29-year-old Atallah each hold a 19% share and  are the new cryptocurrency billionaires. 
 But Atallah was modest, chatting in November at a restaurant in Margaritaville, a new kitsch resort in Times Square, New York, sitting next to a 32-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty, which lights a cocktail instead of a torch. He attended NFT.NYC's third annual convention with 5,500 registered users, 3,000 of whom were on a waiting list. Young lovers roamed the hotel in Bored Ape Yacht Club sweatshirts. This is a tribute to raising 10,000 monkey money. Owners see it as a fraternity, collectible or investment. 
 

Humility is at the heart of Finzer and Atallah's successful strategy. Some consultants have encouraged them to specialize in  NFT niches such as art, gaming, or music. However, they didn't think they were predictable enough to predict what types of NFTs would be popular, so they decided to build a  platform for categorical diagnostics. According to  
 Finzer, OpenSea has succeeded simply by being “in the right place at the right time” and hearing what users  want. The platform tracks NFTs on Ethereum and other blockchains, and all purchases are made in cryptocurrency. Sellers can choose between a fixed price or an auction format. Artists may reserve a percentage of each resale price. Ultimately, Finzer knows that the NFT's ownership verification model applies to everything from concert tickets to real estate. “I always had  pretty gray ideas about the future,” he says. 
 Despite its sudden success, OpenSea faces large and varied risks, from fraud and another NFT market crash to new contenders. In October, Coinbase, the  largest cryptocurrency exchange in Korea and an early investor in OpenSea, announced that it would launch its own NFT P2P market. Coinbase had 2.5 million on its waitlist within a few weeks, and CEO Brian Armstrong predicted that the new business could be “big or bigger” than the major cryptocurrency trading business. 
 

Stefan Curry Boring Monkey #7990

Stephen Curry bought Bored Ape (#7990) NFTs last August for $180,000. He's not the only celebrity with monkeys. Jimmy Fallon and Mark Cuban have their own monkeys. step carry OpenSea's approach to the open market increases the risk of counterfeiting, fraud, and fraud. Contact Amazon or eBay. For example, scammers can copy  someone else's art images and sell them as NFTs on OpenSea. Finzer says the site is developing an automated way to detect counterfeit goods and has a moderator to investigate suspicious offers. However, people can also cause problems. In September, Finzer demanded the resignation of the head of OpenSea's product after Twitter users discovered a cryptocurrency wallet associated with an executive who was buying NFTs just before the price fluctuations appeared on the  OpenSea homepage. own employer. solution.

The founders of  OpenSea may look humble, but their ambitions don't stop there. Bay Area-raised Finzer, a doctor and  software  dad,  says he was "shocked" by rejections at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and Yale universities. (He settled in Brown.) After working briefly as a  software engineer at Pinterest, he co-founded his first startup, Claimdog, in 2015, which he sold  to Credit Karma a year later. Born to an American mother and a Colombian father of Colorado immigrants, Atallah compiled a table to compare all attributes, from birds to browsers. After graduating from Stanford University, he worked as a programmer before teaming up with Finzer.

In January 2018, they joined startup accelerator Y Combinator with the idea of ​​paying cryptocurrency users  to share Wi-Fi hotspots. But at this point, CryptoKitties, cartoonish virtual cats whose ownership records were digitally recorded on the Ethereum blockchain, captured the public's imagination. “This is the first time that people who were not very interested in cryptocurrency suddenly became interested in something other than cryptocurrency toss.