In encouraging news for NFTs, the leading marketplace OpenSea announced on July 20 that it has successfully secured a $100M funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. It brings the OpenSea valuation to $1.5B. The other participants were Coatue, Michael Ovitz, Kevin Hartz, Dylan Field, Kevin Durant, Ashton Kutcher, and Tobi Lutke. This is likely to bolster OpenSea’s efforts to scale its platform and introduce new features.
OpenSea also announced support for Polygon, apart from its native Ethereum blockchain presence. This will allow it to offer gas-free minting and practically free trade-making facility on the Ethereum L2 solution. It’s essential because Ethereum’s block space has lately gotten congested and expensive to operate on, hence it’s necessary that retail users get an economical alternative.
NFTs are rapidly getting attention and usage as a novel asset class by tokenizing digital items or services. This includes domains, art, collectibles, a person’s time or efforts, event tickets, etc. Several new features are also being introduced, this includes a “Created” tab to better track the work of your favorite artists.
It’s also possible for OpenSea buyers to freeze NFT metadata and thus forbid any changes to what they have purchased. The interface also allows for improved buyer protection through additional pop-ups during the check-out process now, declares floor prices on NFT collections, and offers improved UI.
About OpenSea
The first and largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea focuses on every type of Non-Fungible Token (NFT). It allows users to sell art, game items, collectibles, virtual stuff, domain names, etc. OpenSea variety and transaction volumes eclipse that of any other similar platform. The platform has auction features and integrations with crypto infrastructure.
