The platform’s main benefits include a variety of blockchains, a royalty program for NFT creators, and the ability to mine NFTs for free using Polygon.

OpenSea features popular NFT collections as well as various types of digital art, ranging from celebrity photos and meme creators to digital land in metaverses.

Who launched the platform and when?

The NFT trading platform was founded by Devin Finzer (CEO) and Alex Atallah (CTO).

In early 2022 Forbes named them “The First NFT Billionaires,” valuing their combined fortune at $2.2 billion.

The company was founded in 2017, the same year that the site’s beta version went live. The project received its first investment from the Y Combinator incubator in 2018.

The success of the NFT game CryptoKitties, which at the time accounted for the lion’s share of all transactions in the Ethereum network, inspired the OpenSea team to create the marketplace.

With the rapid growth of the NFT sphere in 2021, OpenSea gained significant popularity. The project team was particularly successful in attracting popular collections to its platform, such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, Axie Infinity, and Decentraland. In just one year, the marketplace’s trading volume increased more than 640 times to $14.6 billion, with OpenSea accounting for more than 90% of the total trading volume of non-fungible tokens.

In the spring of 2021, OpenSea raised $23 million in a Series A funding round, and in July it closed a $100 million Series B round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The team held another investor round at the end of 2021, which was expected to result in a $10 billion valuation, but the project was valued at $13.3 billion.

OpenSea was named to the Forbes Fintech 50 list in early 2022, and TIME magazine named the marketplace one of the 100 most influential companies in the world.

How does OpenSea work?

At the start of the project, the team referred to the site as an eBay online store, but for NFT. Today, OpenSea is the largest marketplace for buying, selling, and creating non-fungible token collections.

The platform’s infrastructure for creating NFT is suitable for both novice and advanced users.

To create an account on the site, you must connect one of the 16 supported cryptocurrency wallets, which include MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, Wallet Connect, Fortmatik, Phantom, and others.

NFT statistics and various categories are available on the main page of the OpenSea site: art, collections, domain names, music, photos, virtual lands, in-game assets, memes, and more.

Why OpenSea is so popular?

The platform has a number of advantages that make it appealing and popular among users.

One of the main advantages is that it supports multiple blockchains at the same time: Polygon, Klaytn, and Solana. The developers intend to add popular NFT networks Flow and Tezos in the future.

One of the main advantages is that OpenSea users can issue NFTs for free using the Polygon network and still not pay for gas in Ethereum.

Another advantage is that the creator of NFT can connect the function of “royalty” and receive up to 10% of the value of the token from each transaction after it is sold to other holders.

Why is the project criticized?

The platform implemented a release limit in early 2022, allowing users to place no more than 5 collections of 50 NFTs. However, the innovation was canceled a day later due to numerous complaints.

The admins of the platform explained the decision to impose restrictions by the fact that 80% of the works presented on the site are plagiarized collections or fakes.

After a while, OpenSea launched a number of solutions to combat fraud and plagiarism. The project team believes that this will reduce the number of intellectual property rights violations.

How did crypto winter affect OpenSea?

2022 was one of the worst years in cryptocurrency history, according to CoinGecko. This trend was also reflected in non-exchangeable token trading.

Total NFT trading volume in June 2022 fell 74% to $1.04 billion from $4 billion in May 2021, according to The Bloc analysts. For the same time period, analyst platform Dune provides an even lower figure — $0.5 billion.

Nonetheless, according to data from The Block, OpenSea accounted for two-thirds of all transactions, making it the leading trading platform in its segment.

Because of the drop in activity, the project team announced in July 2022 that it would be laying off 20% of its staff.