NFT Marketplace OpenSea Valued At Over $13 Billion: Know More Details Here

OpenSea is now worth $13.3 billion after a latest investment of $300 million. This online marketplace was founded by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah in New York on December 20, 2017

According to reports, trades on OpenSea jumped 600-fold last year. Image: Getty

New Delhi: If you desire to deal in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), OpenSea could be the right place for trading.

OpenSea, an online marketplace, deals in NFTs, unique pieces of digital code which can be associated with a digital asset like work of digital art.

According to some experts, some of the NFTs in OpenSea have sold for millions of dollars.

OpenSea is now worth $13.3 billion after a latest investment of $300 million. This online marketplace was founded by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah in New York on December 20, 2017.

According to reports, trades on OpenSea jumped 600-fold last year. However, some critics denied it saying the valuation is too high.

Announcing new funding, OpenSea has said it would “look to bring NFTs to a broad consumer audience this year” and reduce their “barriers to entry”.

“In 2021, we saw the world awaken to the idea that NFTs represent the basic building blocks for brand new peer-to-peer economies,” wrote Devin Finzer, who co-founded the company in 2017.

However, others argue the spiraling valuations of some crypto-businesses reflects a shortage of places for investors to put their money.

“There’s far too much money sloshing around and far too few places to put it,” said author David Gerard. “Even the rich are buying lottery tickets.”

The valuation for OpenSea comes at a time when an increasing number of businesses, sports clubs, and celebrities are producing or purchasing NFTs.

Rap artist Eminem is the latest to jump into the NFT bandwagon with his first Bored Ape Yacht Club purchase that cost 123.45 Ether worth $452,000 or Rs 3.36 crore.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of thousands of NFTs of digital illustrations of anthropomorphic apes.

Bored Apes are now considered among the most popular NFTs, the total value of trades just passed $1 billion, according to data from Cryptoslam, an NFT industry data aggregator.

Though not everyone shares the rapper’s appreciation of the digital artworks. The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones called Bored Apes “very ordinary and derivative bit of comic book design”. But BAYC said each ape image is “unique and programmatically generated from over 170 possible traits, including expression, headwear, clothing, and more”.

The total value of trade for NFTs was estimated to be worth $40.9 billion last year, according to data firm Chainalysis.

Last year, the global art market was worth $50.1 billion, it added.

Amid all these, regulators and critics worry that consumers may not appreciate the risks involved in largely unregulated crypto-asset investments such as NFTs. A research by Chainalysis said while many people may collect them, data shows that expert investors make most of the money.

Other analysts worry NFT marketplaces are prone to so-called wash-trading where investors sell and then buy back an NFT they own with the aim of boosting demand.

The environmental hazards of the technology behind NFTs also concerns critics. As with cryptocurrency, the record of who owns what NFT is stored on a shared ledger known as the blockchain, a process maintained by thousands of computers worldwide.

Keeping those computers running creates a considerable demand for electricity and hence, pollution.