What every crypto buyer should know about OpenSea, The King of NFTs Market – One of the most popular NFT marketplace facilitated around $14B in transactions in 2021 and already crossed $1B in 2022. In 2021, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were probably the most successful crypto asset. The tale appears to be continuing in 2022, based on a buzzy investment round earlier this week: After obtaining $300 million, the NFT marketplace OpenSea is currently valued at $13.3 billion.
What is NFT?
NFT stands for non-fungible token. Let’s understand it word by word. Fungible means identical items can replace something.
Non-fungible means an item that can’t be replaced and has a unique identity. So, NFTs are digital assets based on blockchain technology with individual identities and authenticated by the owner. All NFTs are entered in a distributed ledger. If anyone attempts to enter the duplicated NFT, it will be deemed “wrong” and cannot persist in the distributed ledger.
How NFTs Become so Popular?
NFTs were founded around 2013/2014 when users showed interest to trade digital assets other than Bitcoin. NFTs used Ethereum’s virtual machine concept for developing and distributing the tokens.
But NFTs became popular when CryptoPunks and later CryptoKitties came into existence in 2017.
RELATED: Salman Khan to Launch his NFT Collection Soon – BollyCoin
In January 2021, NFTs popularity skyrocketed, and people made it one of the coolest things ever. It all happened due to the world’s crypto demand, and NFT was introduced as an alternative crypto-related investment (e.g., NFTs, centralized exchanges, mining farms) that have outperformed even BTC.
OpenSea was founded in 2017
In 2017 the world witnessed the inception of CryptoKitties. The world experienced a decentralized application built on blockchains for the first time but targetted towards a mainstream audience. The entire globe saw the birth of CryptoKitties in 2017. For the first time, the world saw a decentralized application based on blockchain technology that was aimed at a general audience.
While CryptoKitties appeared to many as a toy, they represented a significant shift in how we engage with digital objects. Unlike prior digital objects stored on company servers, blockchain-native items were stored on public, shared blockchains owned by no single entity. They could be watched from anywhere, transferred freely, and really owned in a way that the digital world had never seen before.
SEE ALSO: Yuvraj Singh Iconic Bat Becomes First Minted NFT Ever to Sent in Space
Fascinated by the emerging movement, Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah joined Discord’s early adopter communities and conversed with members. In December 2017, the OpenSea beta was released.
Despite this, 26 months after going live, they only had 4,000 active users conducting $1.1 million in monthly transactions, translating to a meagre $28,000 in monthly revenue (assuming OpenSea’s 2.5 percent sales fee). CTO Atallah, who conducted his half of the call from the basement of his parents’ Colorado home, where he had gone to work as New York was locked down, recalled that the NFT market had a “dead feeling.”
OpenSea founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah convened a gut-check phone conversation in March 2020, as Covid-19 began to spread. Their five-person company had created a platform that allowed users to produce, purchase, and sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are computer files used to track ownership of unique digital assets like art and music on a catalogue known as a blockchain.
Ominously, Rare Bits, a direct and better-funded competitor, had just announced it was folding. The pair set a do-or-die plan of doubling business by the end of the year—and fulfilled it in September.
OpenSea has grown by more than 500 percent, and Co-Founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah discuss how they plan to keep growing.
It would have been realistic to think of 2021 as the year of Bitcoin and the mainstreaming of cryptocurrency in general at the start of the year. Although this is the year of mainstreaming, NFTs have emerged as a force in their own way, contending with the world’s most well-known cryptocurrency in terms of investor awareness and imagination.
However, the enthusiasm is accompanied by explosive sales. According to Dune Analytics, on OpenSea (Polygon) sold nearly 2 million NFTs in December last year. The data shows that OpenSea (Polygon) NFT sales in December 2021 were a record-high 1,998,459. It was almost 64% higher than OpenSea (Ethereum) ‘s December NFT sales which was 1,220,242.
