World’s largest NFT marketplace OpenSea announces raising $300 million in Series C funding at a $13.3 billion post-money valuation, late Tuesday. As per the press release, the fundraising round was led by San Francisco-based Paradigm and Hegde fund sponsor Coatue. In addition to that, Shiva Rajaraman, who recently joined OpenSea as its new VP of Product from Meta will be leading some of these major initiatives at the platform. Speaking on the latest development David Fenzer, CEO and co-founder of OpenSea noted,
We’re focused on lowering the barriers to entry for NFTs by introducing features and simplified flows that abstract away the complexity of the blockchain. We’re also accelerating our multi-chain support and prioritizing improvements to help people discover, manage, and showcase their NFTs with better tools, analytics, and presentation.
Besides that, OpenSea as per the blog post is also planning to utilize these funds across four key areas.
- Accelerating Product Development and User Experience
- Expanding Trust, Safety, and Reliability Efforts
- Making Meaningful Community Investments
- Growing its Team
OpenSea cementing its position as the dominant NFT marketplace
Starting the year on a positive note, the NFT Kingpin had a power-packed 2021 that saw its total volume of sales skyrocketing by 600x with more investors’ money being continuously pumped in. Last year in March, the startup announced securing a $23 million Series A, and four months later, raised another $100 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $1.5 billion valuation. Some of these high-profile investors who participated in the round included philanthropist Michael Ovitz, famed early-stage investor Kevin Hartz, NBA star Kevin Durant, and Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher.
Previously in December 2021, the largest NFT marketplace also registered the highest-ever trading volume at $3 billion. But being the dominant player among its peers also comes at a cost. In one of the recent events, hackers managed to steal 15 of the popular Bored Ape NFTs from the platform. All these stolen NFTs were worth a staggering $2.2 million in total. Although OpenSea immediately suspended the buying and selling of these digital tokens, the incident exposed the vulnerability of the platform against external attacks.
But despite all these, OpenSea still remains one of the favorite marketplaces for trading NFTs. As a matter of fact, on January 2 last weekend, the marketplace charted the highest ever single-day trading volumes of $240 million, adding another milestone to its list of achievements.