The NFT platform OpenSea announced on Thursday that it had raised $23 million in a round of financing led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Numerous investors and industry VCs including Naval Ravikant, Mark Cuban and 3LAU participated in the investment.
Co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer wrote in a statement: "The world has realized the power of this technology, and it is happening suddenly. In the next few years, billions of people will be introduced into digital ownership, and we have Build OpenSea as a trusted entry point into the world."
Opensea, one of the largest digital collectibles markets, recorded a transaction volume of more than US$90 million in February, a 10-fold increase from US$8 million in January. Some of the scarce NFT assets even set a 30-fold increase in a single day.
Andreessen Horowitz partner Katie Haun said: "OpenSea makes NFT searchable, usable, and orderly." "But it goes further, provides a market that brings all platforms together, and simplifies communication between parties. Transactions, just like eBay and Amazon do."
The venture capital firm mentioned OpenSea's growth when it decided to support NFT, saying that the market had "stand out" in the past 6 months, with transaction volume increasing by 100 times.
As one of the first venture capital companies to enter the field, Andreessen Horowitz has so far invested in various crypto projects, including Libra, Maker DAO and Coinbase. Last month, the company supported Optimism's L2 extension solution.
In 2021, as the cryptocurrency continues to heat up, NFTs also begin to rise. Beeple's NFT work "Every Day: The First 5000 Days" sold for more than $69 million, breaking the NFT sales record. This not only allowed NFT to "out of the circle" completely, but also made Christie's the first large-scale auction house to provide purely digital works with unique NFTs and accept cryptocurrencies.
At the same time, Tesla CEO Musk also stated on Twitter that he would "sell a song about NFT as an NFT." There is an electronic dance music with the theme of NFT in the video. In the video, an NFT-themed trophy rotates in space, surrounded by many cryptocurrencies. The top of the trophy is the moon, and the moon also refers to cryptocurrency in the currency circle culture.
OpenSea has become the preferred website for auctioning encrypted or digital assets, and this round of new financing may pave the way for OpenSea to become the Amazon of NFT.