NFT marketplace Opensea valued at $13.3bn after bumper funding round
The world’s largest NFT marketplace, Opensea, has reached a $13.3bn (£9.8bn) valuation after a nine-figure series c funding round.
Opensea raised $300m in a funding round led by Paradigm and Coatue along with participation from both new and existing investors according to a company statement.
The NFT platform said it will use the funding to accelerate product development, invest in NFT projects and Web3.0 as well as growing its staff team. In 2022 development will be led by Shiva Rajaraman who is joining Opensea as VP of Product from Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook.
“In 2021, we saw the world awaken to the idea that NFTs represent the basic building blocks for brand new peer-to-peer economies,” said Opensea in a statement, revealing that transaction volume on the platform increased 600-fold in 2021.
The platform was founded by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah in 2017, long before NFTs were catapulted into the mainstream. Opensea has benefitted from the explosive growth of the NFT market in 2021, attracting a surge of high profile projects, customers and investors despite the well publicised risks of trading in digital assets.
Last month NFT trader Todd Kramer was the victim of a phishing scam which saw him lose eight of his Bored Ape Yacht Club, digital artworks which have a floor price of £194,396.
Mistakes are also common. In December, a trader accidentally sold a Bored Ape NFT for $3,000 instead of $300,000 on Opensea after forgetting to add a zero.
In today’s statement Opensea confirmed the platform is “actively expanding” efforts across “customer support, trust and safety, and site stability and integrity.” While the support team is only 60 strong at the moment Opensea expects this number to double by the end of this year.
Read more: Best of 2021: The unstoppable rise of NFTs