In 2017, two Brown University graduates — Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah — launched OpenSea, a marketplace for buying and selling NFTs. At the time, NFTs were barely a thing. CryptoKitties had gone viral briefly in late 2017, but most crypto people considered NFTs a curiosity rather than a serious category. OpenSea would bet everything on NFTs becoming something bigger.
For three years, OpenSea was a small operation with a tiny user base. The founders lived off investor money and slowly built infrastructure for a world that didn’t really exist yet. They added support for more NFT standards. They built features for collectors to browse and trade. They made the buying process simpler. Progress was incremental, and the market was small.
Then came 2021, and everything changed. The Beeple auction in March sparked mainstream interest in NFTs. Bored Apes and other profile picture projects exploded. Overnight, OpenSea went from processing millions in monthly volume to billions. By August 2021, OpenSea was handling $3 billion in monthly trading volume. The company raised funding at a $13 billion valuation. The founders became billionaires. Employee count grew from a handful to hundreds.
OpenSea became the de facto eBay of NFTs. If you wanted to buy a Bored Ape, a CryptoPunk, or any of thousands of other NFTs, OpenSea was where you went. It listed every major collection, had an intuitive interface, and handled the complex smart contract interactions behind the scenes. At its peak, OpenSea had over 70% market share of all NFT trading.
The company also had problems. Insider trading scandals rocked OpenSea in 2021, with executives accused of buying NFTs they knew would soon be featured on the homepage. The 2022 bear market crushed NFT trading volume — OpenSea’s monthly volume dropped 95% from its peak. Competitors emerged: Blur, a pro-trader marketplace, took significant market share. OpenSea laid off staff and struggled to find its identity. By 2024, OpenSea was still the largest general NFT marketplace, but its dominance had been permanently broken. Still, its role in history is secure: OpenSea made NFT trading accessible to millions of people and proved that there was real demand for a marketplace of digital collectibles.
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