OpenSea

Can gaming resurrect the NFT market? OpenSea thinks so • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Crypto, NFTs, OpenSea, Startups, TechCrunch Sessions: Crypto 2022No Comments

Today at ZebethMedia’s crypto-focused event in Miami, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer discussed his business, and the future market for non-fungible tokens. The digital assets, better known by the acronym ‘NFT,’ saw their stock rise during the 2021-era crypto boom. NFTs became synonymous with neo-wealth bubbling up from the blockchain economy, as a number of image collections that employed the digital asset format reached pop-culture status and eye-watering prices. However, as ZebethMedia has reported, the evolving market for crypto-related activities and products is currently in a downturn. NFT trading volumes are depressed compared to year-ago levels, and elsewhere in the decentralized economy there’s chaos to be found as the implosion of exchange FTX continues to reverberate. This made Finzer’s appearance at the event potentially clarifying — in the midst of a downturn, where does OpenSea see the future for its core product category? Naturally given that he’s running a company in the space, we expected optimism from the tech executive. He delivered. Inside his perspective, however, a few key themes emerged that caught our attention. (ZebethMedia has riffed on the idea of how it re-ignite consumer interest in NFTs, it’s worth noting). First, gaming. Finzer argued early in his conversation with our own Anita Ramaswamy that the world of NFTs is “quite diverse,” going on to state that NFTs in games are a place where his market is seeing an “explosion in innovation.” The CEO also cited gaming as a market opportunity for NFTs to spark more consumer enthusiasm (OpenSea is working on assisting games and gaming companies mint NFTs). The union of gaming and digital assets has proved a popular theme for press coverage and founder activity. However, much focus during the last crypto boom focused on play-to-earn (P2E) games like Axie Infinity. But while Axie has seen its fortunes rise and fall, OpenSea appears to be yet bullish to gaming-related NFTs. As a person who has spent a reasonable amount of time in games like Diablo franchise, I can imagine certain use cases for the pairing, even if I remain a little bit skeptical of bringing real-world economics into most video games. The scale of Finzer’s excitement regarding NFTs and gaming indicates to this publication that it’s perhaps where we should be most focused when covering what the asset varietal can do next. Looking more broadly at the NFT market space itself, Finzer argued on stage that platforms like Instagram joining the industry will be net-positive. In his view, inclusion of NFTs from social companies may provide an on-ramp to the crypto market for regular folks. Given that, historically, such points of entry have been criticized as too steep, new methods of getting consumers into NFTs is likely welcome to his platform. The future of NFTs may be less crypto-focused than it has been. Finzer cited the recent Reddit NFT effort in a discussion of trust, consumers, and crypto more generally. Many Reddit NFT users are not aware that it’s a crypto-powered product, he explained. If consumers are willing to engage with crypto products outside of a crypto-native experience, it is easier to see how gaming and crypto could eventually find common ground. What’s ahead for the company? Not a native token, at least not yet, per our chat with OpenSea today. The company also didn’t want to talk about potential fundraises, though we do expect it to raise more capital in 2023. After listening to the chat, it felt like the era of pricey profile pictures had faded to the background. Now we have to see if the potential use cases for NFTs in other areas of the digital economy — and perhaps even IRL — can make the jump from possibility, to reality.

There’s still juice in the NFT market despite very real downturn • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in coinbase, Crypto, EC Blockchain, EC Cryptocurrency, EC Newsletter, NFTs, OpenSea, The ExchangeNo Comments

But from Coinbase to Reddit, OpenSea is no longer the only fish in the sea Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 8 hours Eight months ago, this column asked if we were entering an NFT downturn. The answer, it turns out, was a giant yes. That NFT hype is behind us is something we could tell without even looking at any data. But we do love data, and backing up our hunches, so we’re going to take a closer look at some of the very same charts we examined earlier this year. The universe of non-fungible tokens is fragmented by definition since they can be minted and sold by anyone across a number of blockchains and marketplaces. But there’s actually a reasonably good proxy to evaluate how the market is doing: trading volume on OpenSea, one of the main NFT marketplaces, and a startup that was valued at more than $10 billion earlier this year. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on ZebethMedia+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. We need to add a caveat here: OpenSea was perhaps more central to the NFT market when we started using it as a reference than it is today. In the meantime, new players have emerged, and not all of them share OpenSea’s Ethereum-based roots. For instance, there’s Joepegs, an NFT marketplace on the Avalanche blockchain that recently raised a $5 million seed round from the Avalanche Foundation and FTX Ventures (whose funds they “transferred out of FTX prior to recent bankruptcy events,” the Joepegs team said in a statement.) More importantly, Coinbase finally launched its long-anticipated NFT marketplace. But it was off to a lackluster start, and data from analytics platform Dune shows that trading volume on CoinbaseNFT is only a small fraction of OpenSea’s tally (or LooksRare’s, for that matter) over the same period.

OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer discusses staying on top of a turbulent NFT market at TC Sessions: Crypto • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in Crypto, NFT marketplace, NFTs, OpenSea, TC Sessions: Crypto 2022No Comments

The NFT market is worth tens of billions of dollars and saw rapid growth throughout the crypto bull run. NFT exchange OpenSea, led by CEO and co-founder Devin Finzer, emerged as a clear market leader, earning a $13.3B valuation in January and controlling an estimated 90% of the overall NFT market. Since then, it’s been a bumpy ride for NFTs. Trading volumes have fallen over 90% from their January peak, forcing exchanges, including OpenSea, to conduct steep layoffs. And for OpenSea specifically, competition is mounting, as newer entrants such as Magic Eden threaten its dominance and rumors of an OpenSea IPO have fizzled out. Big tech could stifle long-term growth in the space, too, as Apple’s and Google’s high marketplace fees challenge the idea that NFT trading can ever reach mobile adoption. There are plenty of challenges on the horizon, but there’s also tremendous potential for OpenSea to capture long-term growth in the NFT market if it does indeed occur. There are undeniable pockets of excitement in the space, so the question is whether that excitement will be realized and whether OpenSea is well-positioned to capture it. These are some of the topics we’ll discuss with Finzer onstage at ZebethMedia Sessions: Crypto. We’ll ask him about what use cases for NFTs he sees the most potential in and will hear about how the company plans to sustain its first-mover advantage and seize new growth opportunities through a bear market. The event takes place on November 17 in Miami. Save $150 with early bird pricing and buy your pass today, and then join the web3, DeFi and NFT communities to keep up with the ever-evolving and always exciting crypto world.

Yes, but CEOs? That’s complicated) • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 15, 2022Posted in Brex, CFO, noom, OpenSea, StartupsNo Comments

There’s no one who knows a company’s inner workings like a chief financial officer. So, when three high-profile CFOs leave their jobs at richly valued, late-stage startups in quick succession, we notice it. This week, OpenSea CFO Brian Roberts left the web3 company less than a year after taking the job. Days later, Brex CFO Adam Swiecicki left the expense management company to join Rippling, another company that recently expanded into the expense management space. The shuffle came on the heels of Brex announcing it had to slash 11% of staff. (Its former CFO, who stepped down so Swiecicki could take the helm, is back in his original position). “The first person who is going to know if it’s possible to grow into these valuations is the CFO.” Continuum CEO Nolan Church But that’s not all. Noom, a diet and health coaching platform, confirmed that its CFO, Mike Noonan, is leaving the job two years after joining, hours before ZebethMedia learned that the company was executing a round of layoffs. While the CFO departures are reportedly unrelated to the layoffs, is anything ever that simple? After all, layoffs were a result of needing to strengthen financials ahead of an uncertain market, quite literally the job of a chief financial officer.