Why a 'Mobile-First' Mentality Drove OpenSea's Latest Acquisition

Prominent $NFT marketplace OpenSea announced Tuesday that it acquired mobile token trading and portfolio management app Rally (formerly Floor) in an effort to build “the on-chain everything app.”

As part of the acquisition, Rally co-founders Chris Maddern and Christine Hall—the latter the former COO at Robinhood Crypto—will join OpenSea’s executive team, with Maddern taking the role of chief technology officer and Hall becoming OpenSea’s chief of staff. Details of the deal were not disclosed.

OpenSea commanded much of the trading volume during the explosive $NFT trading boom of 2021 and 2022. While $NFT demand has plunged since then, OpenSea is undertaking a full transformation this year, unveiling its OS2 platform complete with fungible token trading and announcing support for an upcoming SEA token that will come from the OpenSea Foundation.

“OpenSea today has hundreds of thousands of active $NFT traders with connected wallets who trust OpenSea as their portal to Web3.” Maddern told Decrypt. "Throughout 2025, we’ll grow our relationship with these users to expand the types of activities they do on OpenSea."

Maddern added that token trading has been “by far our fastest-growing activity.” With its latest acquisition, the platform appears prime to expand even further with a particular focus on the mobile experience. 

“We’re reimagining mobile from the ground up to create a product that brings tokens and NFTs together in a magical way—a single home for on-chain crypto on your phone,” Hall told Decrypt. “We expect that while our volume will grow more quickly on desktop, mobile will massively outpace desktop for consumer growth.”

As part of its efforts to create an everything app for crypto users, Maddern highlighted a few pre-requisites the company will need to address beyond mobile, including making decentralized finance (DeFi) and perps simple and accessible, along with embracing AI. 

“Users are looking for a single, simple place to be able to discover and engage with on-chain assets—OpenSea will be that place,” said Maddern. “The future of Web3 will be mobile-first, because that’s how people interact with everything else in their digital lives.”

Rally began as an $NFT portfolio app, allowing users to keep track of their $NFT performance via a native mobile app. As Floor, the firm raised $8 million in June 2022 and eventually rebranded to Rally in September 2024, as it had expanded into more on-chain activities like meme coin trading and performance. 

For the foreseeable future, Maddern said that users can use the Rally app as they typically would, with a migration path to the reimagined OpenSea mobile experience coming later this year.

OpenSea first launched its original mobile app back in 2021 during the peak of the $NFT trading frenzy. The platform has once more claimed the lead in Ethereum $NFT trading market share, capturing more than 50% in the last 3 months according to data from Tiexo. OpenSea had previously lost market share in recent years to buzzy rivals like Blur and Magic Eden.

In February, OpenSea co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer said that the SEC would be ending its investigation into the marketplace, which centered on the potential classification of NFTs as securities. That move added to a string of dropped investigations and lawsuits since Donald Trump took office.