On July 20, 2021, turning into a unicorn. This funding round was led by Silicon Valley’s best-known venture capitalist firm Andreessen HorowitzAfter (a16z). Apart from a16z some other participants include Ashton Kutcher, Creative Artists Agency, Coatue, Shawn Mendes, and Kevin Durant. It was just in the last few years that this company became a leading platform for NFTs and crypto collectibles.
Earlier OpenSea raised 2M$ in a seed round funding on May 10, 2018, with investors including Blockchain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Founders Fund, conformation, Foundation Capital, Stable Fund, Blockstack, Chemin group, BI, and some of the angel investors including founding teams of Youtube, Eventbrite, Stubhub, Gametime, Quantstamp and Figma.
After that on November 20, 2019, it raised 2.1 million$ in series A funding from the investors David padzan, Animoca brands, and 4 others. It raised another $23m in series A funding on March 8, 2021, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) including 20 angel investors and some firms named Dylan field, Linda Xie, Alexis Ohanian, Mark Cuban, and Naval Ravikant.
As Finzer said, OpenSea is one of the first largest blockchain NFTs marketplace representing digital art and collectibles, domain names, event tickets, and millions of other assets backed by blockchains with its headquarters established in New York City and founded by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah in 2017. It’s the world’s largest decentralized peer-to-peer platform for the trade and acquisition of NFTs.
There was no such platform available when digital tokens first entered the market for sale and purchase. The open sea was the first of its kind. For every successful transaction, this platform charges a 2.5% fee which helps the platform to run the marketplace
Earlier this platform was used by the crypto kitties as a marketplace and it was among the first decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain. As the world is changing from the physical to the digital era, we need platforms that could fill this gap to transfer and create digital ownership.
Here, platforms like open sea are heavily relied upon. The major uses of OpenSea include NFT minting, Source of NFT stats, and as a marketplace for selling and buying NFTs as per nft marketplace OpenSea 100m series A16z nelsoncoindesk.
OpenSea uses smart contracts for buying and selling NFTs as these contracts are programmed in a way to maintain trust on the platform and to ensure there’s no cheating. OpenSea uses ERC-1155 and ERC-721 Ethereum so that users claim ownership of assets that belong to them only. The finest feature is that purchases and sales are carried out directly between buyers and sellers on the Ethereum network.
This funding will help OpenSea to scale its NFTs marketplace platform, grow internationally to new markets and audiences, employ engineering expertise and make it more user-friendly by making It easier to buy and sell digital assets. Usually, the most popular NFTs are found on Ethereum. OpenSea has plans to expand to other blockchains too.
As part of the announcement, it showed support for klayton and polygon. The company has also announced that it has removed Ethereum gas fees for buyers, sellers, and creators.
With time the company plans to reduce the transaction fees across all platforms as it had done previously with polygon, making it more convenient for users to use any payment method they want to use for transactions and making the public aware of the NFTs. Users will be allowed to use any crypto wallet they want to use in this marketplace.
