it's fair to say The nft space has lost much of its shine in recent years, but that hasn't stopped some founders, investors, and projects from moving forward in hopes of another surge. Devin Finzer, the CEO of OpenSea, one of the first nft marketplaces to gain significant traction and market share, remains a big bet on the sector.
On January 1, 2022, global nft sales volume peaked at $23.73 billion. Two years later, on the first day of 2024, they had fallen 94% at just 1.4 billion dollars.
That kind of decline in sales volume has obviously had an impact on the revenue side of OpenSea's business, but Finzer says it's not something the company is “focused on.” Instead, the company is working to improve its core products and user engagement, and attract new incumbents; work “that kind of leads to higher volumes,” he told me recently on TechCrunch. Chain Reaction Podcast.
The nft market exploded in 2021, with everyone and their grandmother spending on NFTs of profile pictures and digital art, but Finzer believes those were the first use cases. “We still have a lot of work to do in terms of representing the full range of things that NFTs can represent,” she said. "Games are an example of a category that is still very early."
Founded in 2017, OpenSea quickly became one of the most well-known and funded nft marketplaces in the world. It has raised more than $400 million in total, and some of its backers include venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm, as well as celebrities like Kevin Durant and Ashton Kutcher.
