Marketplace for digital items: This is NFT pioneer OpenSea

• Open marketplace for creating and trading NFTs
• Rapid rise during the NFT boom
• Portfolio expansion saves OpenSea after NFT market collapse

In December 2017, OpenSea was founded by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah in New York. The crypto company is an open marketplace for creating and trading all types of NFTs – whether art, music, event tickets or games. Some NFTs can even be exchanged for physical objects such as sneakers, while others can be used in online games.

OpenSea provides a platform where users can create, buy and sell all types of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Digital tokens can also be exchanged, such as “native blockchain tokens, governance tokens, in-game currencies, memecoins and co-branded NFT collection tokens,” according to the OpenSea website. A connection is established to liquidity aggregators, whereby the custody of the tokens always remains with the customer, i.e. they are exchanged directly from their own wallet. All NFTs or cryptocurrencies are stored directly on the blockchain and are accessible via the self-custody crypto wallets. The OpenSea wallet contains a public identifier, and several wallets can be linked to one account, for example to collect rewards across different blockchains, the company explains on its website.

OpenSea is compatible with a number of blockchains, specifically “Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, ZORA, Base, Blast, Sei, B3, Berachain, Flow, ApeChain, Soneium, Shape, Unichain, Ronin, Abstract, Solana, GUNZ, HyperEVM, Somnia, and Monad blockchains”.

OpenSea benefits from NFT hype

OpenSea has a long history of success, with the crypto company particularly gaining prominence during the NFT hype in 2021. OpenSea co-founder Atallah still remembers March 2020, when the corona pandemic was becoming more and more of a burden, as he said to his colleague Finzer in a telephone conversation that the NFT market felt “dead,” as Forbes writes. At the time, there were just 4,000 active users on the platform and $1.1 million in monthly transactions were recorded, which in turn corresponded to sales of just $28,000.

However, in February 2021, the NFT business picked up speed. In July, OpenSea was able to process transactions worth $350 million. That same month, the company also raised $100 million in venture capital in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $1.5 billion. “OpenSea forms the interface between the consumer and infrastructure levels of the digital goods economy and is a critical enabler in this new world of digital property rights,” Horowitz wrote in the investment announcement at the time.

The hype around NFTs kept growing. In August, the transaction volume climbed to an impressive $3.4 billion, Forbes continued. In 2022 – amid the spectacular collapse of the crypto exchange FTX, which resulted in numerous other bankruptcies, the NFT market also came under heavy pressure. OpenSea also felt this clearly: While triple-digit millions of US dollars in monthly sales were generated at the peak of the NFT boom in January 2022, in October 2023 only three million US dollars in monthly sales were generated, writes Forbes. In addition to the general downturn in the NFT market, increasing competition, particularly from Blur, was also a stressful factor, which led to OpenSea having to lay off half of its then 175 employees.

After the NFT boom

The NFT boom is over and it is uncertain whether it will regain the same momentum as it did at its peak a few years ago. Nevertheless, OpenSea has managed to rank behind Blur as the second largest of the now numerous NFT marketplaces with a market share of 23.3 percent, according to data from Token Terminal. Over the last three years, the company reported a total trading volume of $4.6 billion. Meanwhile, revenue for the same period was $58.6 million. The number of monthly active users over the last three years was 64,300, Token Terminal data shows. (As of February 2026) As the company writes on its website, there are now more than 2 million collections, more than 80 million NFTs and a total volume of 20 billion US dollars. OpenSea has managed to get its customer base excited not only about NFTs, but also about trading cryptocurrencies, which also allowed the company to benefit from the memecoin boom.

OpenSea is led by co-founder Devin Finzer. His former colleague Alex Atallah and former CTO has now left the company and is devoting himself to other projects.

Editorial team finanzen.net