UPDATED 13:07 EDT / JULY 20 2021

BLOCKCHAIN

OpenSea raises $100M on $1.5B valuation to scale up NFT marketplace

Digital collectible marketplace OpenSea today announced that it has raised $100 million in funding on a $1.5 billion valuation to scale up its marketplace for crypto collectibles and nonfungible tokens.

Andreessen Horowitz led the Series B funding round with participation from Coatue and CAA. Other investors involved in the round included Michael Ovitz, Kevin Hartz, Dylan Field, Kevin Durant, Ashton Kutcher and Tobie Lutke.

OpenSea is one of the largest marketplaces for NFTs, which are a new economy of digital assets traded using blockchain technology to create digital ownership. NFTs can represent items in video games, pieces of digital artwork, collectibles, event tickets, domain names, real estate, securities and even luxury items.

The company also said it will launch official support for multiple blockchains, making it the first cross-blockchain NFT marketplace.

“With increasing market adoption around crypto economies, NFTs are quickly becoming the new internet,” said Devin Finzer, co-founder and chief executive of OpenSea. “It’s pretty remarkable to be experiencing one of the biggest fundamental changes the internet economy has seen in decades.”

The NFT market has seen some ups and downs recently, with sales across the board reaching a peak in May. According to data from NonFungible.com, the NFT market shot up suddenly in May from $10 million in January and began trading more than $250 million worth of tokens, only to fall considerably to $60 million in June.

Since then the market has recovered somewhat, with sales rising back to more than $180 million in the month as of July 20.

However, despite that, according to Finzer, OpenSea’s own sales didn’t suffer much in the pitched seas of the NFT market as its marketplace sold $160 million in digital assets during June 2021. Finzer added that OpenSea saw its volume grow by 45 times during the first half of 2021.

Finzer told Fortune that the company is currently profitable. It has a low overhead and takes 2.5% of all NFT transactions. There are currently 30 people on the team and the company is hiring. However, there might be concerns that inflation could turn investors away from NFTs. He added that the company has already matched its merchandising figures for June as of the first half of July.

OpenSea caters to a wide variety of NFT markets, which include high-volume collectible avatar projects such as Hashmasks, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Meebits. These projects combine digital artwork with access to Discord and Telegram social clubs, which have seen huge success on OpenSea.

“The team at OpenSea realized early on the need for an open, cross-blockchain marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and create digital NFTs which is why they are one of the most important companies in crypto today,” said Kathryn Haun, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

With cross-blockchain support, OpenSea announced official support for the Polygon blockchain and will eliminate gas or transaction fees for creators, buyers and sellers on its marketplace. The marketplace currently supports Ethereum, Polygon, Klaytn and plans to add new chains such as Flow and Tezos in the coming months.

Image: Pixabay

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU