OpenSea’s CEO sees greater opportunity for NFT use cases to grow (w/ Devin Finzer)

Chain Reaction - A podcast by TechCrunch, Yashad Kulkarni, Maggie Stamets, Kell Keller, Jacquelyn Melinek

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This year, Chain Reaction is doing monthly series diving into different topics and themes in crypto. To start things off, this month we’re focusing on NFTs. For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Devin Finzer, the CEO of NFT marketplace OpenSea. He co-founded OpenSea in 2017 and it quickly climbed to become one of the most well known – and well funded – NFT marketplaces. Two years ago, it raised $300 million in a Series C round at a $13.3 billion post-money valuation, bringing its total capital raised to over $400 million. Some of its investors include firms Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm as well as celebrities like Kevin Durant and Ashton Kutcher. Despite the NFT market’s trading volume falling from all time highs in late 2021 early 2022, OpenSea is still pushing forward even though other NFT marketplaces have popped up and challenged their dominance.