OpenSea Valued at $13B Following Latest Funding Round
- The $300 million Series C was co-led by Coatue and Paradigm, and also saw participation from new and existing investors.
- OpenSea now plans to launch a grant program in Q1 2022, which will support the developers “shaping the future of the NFT space”.
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Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea has reached a valuation of $13.3 billion following its $300 million Series C funding round, the company said in a blog post on 4 January.
According to the announcement, the funding round was co-led by Coatue and Paradigm, and also saw the participation from new and existing investors, such as Kathryn Haun’s — a former Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) partner — investment fund KRH. The investors that participated in the Series C valued the company at $13.3 billion, which is in line with the rumors from November that claimed the marketplace had received investment offers that could value it above $10 billion. The CEO and co-founder of OpenSea, Devin Finzer, said in a statement:
“Our ambition is to foster the scale and growth of the broader NFT ecosystem including raising the profile of emerging creators and investing in the people who shape the NFT space for the better today.”
The newly acquired funds will not only help OpenSea remain the leading venue for trading NFTs, but also accelerate its product development. The company will also improve its customer support and customer safety, hire more employees, and invest in the wider NFT and Web3 communities. OpenSea is also planning to launch a grant program in the first quarter of 2022, which will “support the developers, builders, and creators shaping the future of the NFT space”.
While many crypto and blockchain-related companies started developing and launching their own NFT marketplaces — such as Blockchain.com, FTX.US, and Coinbase — right after the asset class became popular in 2021, OpenSea was established all the way back in 2018. According to data from Dune analytics, the company logged an average of $3 billion in transactions per month in the last quarter of 2021, and has already surpassed $1 billion in volume since the start of 2022.
- Users of Binance NFT can now use select blue-chip NFT collections as collateral to take out cryptocurrency loans.
- The platform will initially support only loans in ETH, and NFT collections Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Azuki, and Doodles.
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- The Binance NFT marketplace said it will soon expand its multichain ecosystem, and add support for Bitcoin Ordinals, which are also known as Bitcoin NFTs.
- The platform said it will allow users to purchase and trade Ordinals directly from their Binance accounts, bypassing the need to create a separate inscription wallet.
- Magic Eden’s “fully audited” Bitcoin Ordinal marketplace will only support secondary sales of Bitcoin NFTs, though it is looking into tools to allow for easy mint of such collectibles.
- Royalties will also be unavailable from the start due to the lack of tooling on the Bitcoin network, but the marketplace is “actively looking” into the development of a new royalty standard.