Thanks To NFT, OpenSea Boss Becomes Twisted

OpenSea's most popular NFT marketplace founded by Alex Atallah and Devin Finzer (CotoBitcoin)

JAKARTA - The two founders of OpenSea, Alex Atallah and Devin Finzer, have become new young billionaires as a result of the skyrocketing popularity of Non-fungible Tokens (NFT). Atallah and Finzer's wealth is estimated to be worth US$2.2 billion, or around Rp. 31.5 trillion.

Both of them are still relatively young with their age ranging from 30 years. Alex Atallah is a graduate of Stanford University. He has worked at the United States (US) company engaged in big data analysis, Palantir. After that, he worked at Silicon Valley start-ups Whatsgodly and Zugata.

Meanwhile, Devin Finzer was a software engineer at Pinterest in 2015. That year, he also founded his first start-up company, ClaimDog, which he sold to Credit Karma.

The wealth of both of them increased thanks to the increasing popularity of NFT, which made OpenSea a platform for buying and selling these assets and getting the attention of investors.

What is OpenSea?

OpenSea is a marketplace devoted to buying and selling NFTs. The marketplace was founded by Atallah and Finzer in 2017 and is currently valued at $13.3 billion. This amount rose sharply compared to the previous six months which was only around 1.5 US dollars.

The founders of OpenSea are estimated to own an 18.5 percent stake, or each worth US$2.2 billion. This number makes them the world's first NFT billionaires.

To note, OpenSea is one of the early players in the NFT market. OpenSea provides a 2.5 percent discount on each sale of these assets.

OpenSea Market Value

OpenSea itself explained that in March 2020 the number of monthly active users had reached 4,000 people with transaction values ranging from 1.1 million US dollars or Rp. 15.7 billion. In that year, OpenSea also received funding of around US$ 28,000 or Rp. 400 million.

This amount experienced a significant increase in the July 2021 period. The company received 100 million US dollars (Rp 1.4 trillion) from the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, after recording monthly transactions of around 350 million US dollars (Rp 5 trillion).

Monthly OpenSea transactions continued to increase in the August 2021 period with a value of US$3.4 billion (Rp48.7 trillion). This resulted in them receiving additional funding of 85 million US dollars (Rp 1.2 trillion).

Recently, OpenSea received funding of US$300 million (Rp4.3 trillion) from a funding round led by Paradign and Coatue Management. The injection of funds brings OpenSea's current valuation to US$13.3 billion or around Rp190 trillion.

According to the company's statement, the funds will be used for product development, team, customer security, and the community. On the other hand, the large funds can be used by OpenSea to make acquisitions. According to news from Axios, OpenSea intends to acquire crypto wallet start-up Dharma Labs.