A Safe, Open Marketplace for Digital Art

If 2021 goes down in the history books as the year non-fungible tokens, or NFTS, really took off—witness headline-making deals like Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days fetching $69 million at auction and Jack Dorsey’s first tweet selling for $2.9 million—opensea may be the reason. Not because the site facilitated the sale of those instantly iconic works (it didn’t), but because the platform, the first and largest NFT marketplace, has provided a safe, open environment for all the other creators and collectors who want to get in on the digital art craze.

More than 90 percent of all purchases and sales of Nfts—which essentially represent proof of ownership for unique digital works of art stored on a ledger known as a blockchain—now happen on Opensea; in November, the site that Finzer and Atallah built surpassed $10 billion in all-time sales. More mainstream artists and brands, like The Weeknd and Vogue Singapore, have taken notice, launching NFTS on its marketplace.

Success attracts competitors, including Coinbase, the world’s second largest crypto exchange, which announced in October that it’s building its own NFT marketplace. But Opensea’s founders are betting their formula will continue to be a winning one. As Atallah told Yahoo!: “We’ve stuck to our core principles, which is building an open marketplace that allows developers to be as creative as they want. That provides safety measures for buyers, including the longest-running collection, verification and safety lists in the market.” —k.r.