coincodex.com
Key highlights:
- NFT marketplace OpenSea has raised $100 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz
- The investment round values OpenSea at $1.5 billion
- OpenSea is expanding to blockchains beyond Ethereum, starting with Polygon
OpenSea raises $100 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion
NFT marketplace OpenSea has raised $100 million in a Series B round that values the company at a whopping $1.5 billion. The round was led by venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, while Michael Ovitz, Ashton Kutcher and others participated as angel investors.
On OpenSea, users can collect and sell NFTs from a variety of issuers, or mint NFTs of their own. The platform also features OpenSea-exclusive NFT collections. In June, the platform handled $160 million worth of NFT sales.
OpenSea entered the NFT space earlier than most of its competitors – the project launched in 2017, while NFTs truly started taking off just earlier this year (although there were some earlier flashes of growth such as CryptoKitties in late 2017).
Now, NFTs seem to be positioned as one of the best ways to introduce cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to the masses. In a statement to GamesBeat, OpenSea CEO David Finzer commented on how the $100 million investment round will help OpenSea reach its mass adoption ambitions:
“The fundraise is really all around bringing widespread adoption to NFTs. And it’s about growing the platform that we’ve built, which has seen significant volume growth over the last the first half of the year. We think NFTs are really one of those once every couple-of-decades paradigm shifts that is just incredibly exciting.”
The OpenSea platform is built on Ethereum, but the team is working on also adding support for other blockchain platforms like Flow and Tezos. For example, OpenSea is now adding support for Polygon, a blockchain that has emerged as one of the most popular ways to address Ethereum’s current scalability limitations. The Polygon integration allows OpenSea to offer gas-free transactions to users.
There is considerable demand from venture capital investors in the NFT sector – NFT marketplace Rarible raised $14.2 million in June, while digital collectibles platform Sorare is reportedly about to raise a whopping $532 million at a valuation of $3.8 billion. OpenSea themselves also already raised capital this year, with a $23 million Series A announced in March.