it's fair to say The NFT space has lost a lot of its luster in recent years, but that hasn't stopped some founders, investors, and projects from trucking ahead in hopes of another surge. Devin Finzer, CEO of OpenSea, one of the first NFT marketplaces to gain serious traction and market share, is still betting big on the space.
On January 1, 2022, global NFT sales peaked at $23.73 billion. Two years later, by the first day of 2024, it had fallen 94% to just $1.4 billion.
While this volume decline is clearly impacting the bottom line of OpenSea's business, Finzer says it's not something the company is “particularly focused on.” Instead, the company is working to improve its core product and user engagement and bring in new incumbents, an effort that will “lead to increased production,” the company recently told TechCrunch's Chain Reaction podcast.
The NFT market exploded in 2021 when everyone and their grandmother was spending money on NFTs of profile pictures and digital art, but Finzer believes those were early use cases. Masu. “We still have a lot of work to do in terms of representing the full breadth of things that NFTs can represent,” he said. “Games are an example of a category that is still in its infancy.”
Founded in 2017, OpenSea has quickly become one of the most well-known and well-funded NFT marketplaces in the world. The company has raised more than $400 million in total, with backers including venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm, as well as celebrities such as Kevin Durant and Ashton Kutcher.