Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah

Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah are the founders of OpenSea, a blockchain startup and NFT trading platform.

Youth and education

The founders of OpenSea may seem modest, but they are not lacking in ambition. Devin Finzer was born in 1990 to a family of a general practitioner and a software developer. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended Miramonte High School in Orinda, California.

When he had to apply to universities, he was «stunned» to be rejected by Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale. As a result, in 2013, Devin enrolled at Brown University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and mathematics. During his first year, Finzer worked with Dylan Field (the future founder of Figma) to create CourseKick, a socially-oriented search engine for registering for university courses. Just two weeks after the site was launched, more than 20% of students registered on it.

During his studies, Finzer also interned at the Wikimedia Foundation, Google Cloud Platform, and Flipboard. After graduation, he took a job as a software engineer at Pinterest in San Francisco.

In 2015, Finzer co-founded Claimdog, a personal financial app. The project became a hit, at least according to Credit Karma, which bought Claimdog in 2016. It was at Credit Karma that Finzer became interested in blockchain technology.

Alex Atallah was born in 1992 to a Colombian immigrant and an American mother in Colorado. As a child, he made tables to compare the qualities of all possible objects, from birds to browsers. After graduating from Stanford, Alex worked as a programmer. Later, he started working with Finzer. Together, the pair of developers created and presented WifiCoin, which offered users tokens in exchange for sharing a wireless router. The programmers presented their idea to the Y Combinator business incubator.

OpenSea: founding a startup and a difficult initial period

At that time, CryptoKitties, animated virtual kittens, were in the center of attention of the crypto community. Records of their ownership were recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. Inspired by the release of CryptoKitties, the developers moved on to the market of irreplaceable tokens. This is how OpenSea was born in December 2017.

After months of planning, Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah announced the launch of the platform, albeit at an early beta stage. Given that NFT technology was relatively new at the time, OpenSea became the first real player in the game and the only NFT marketplace on Ethereum.

However, in early 2018, interest in cryptocurrencies and NFTs waned.

After a previous funding round led by Y Combinator in 2018, OpenSea was able to raise $ 2.1 million in venture capital in November of the following year.

By the end of 2019, the platform was well established, had cash on hand, and was ready for NFTs to become more mainstream.

To create an NFT, digital assets need to be «minted» and assigned a unique identifier from the blockchain. So in 2020, OpenSea launched a minting platform. It allowed users to create, upload, and control their own NFTs for free, as well as sell and buy others'.

In March 2021, the company raised $ 23 million in venture capital. Four months later, OpenSea announced another round of investment of $ 100 million, which turned it into a unicorn.

Twenty-six months after entering the market, the company had only 4,000 active users and a monthly transaction volume of $ 1.1 million, resulting in monthly revenue of only $ 28,000 (including a 2.5% sales commission). According to Atallah, the NFT market «seemed dead» at the time.

In February 2021, the NFT market came out of hibernation and OpenSea made a breakthrough.

As NFT prices reached dizzying heights, ordinary people increasingly decided to become creators, collectors, or speculators of fungible tokens. Users turned to OpenSea, a platform with a built-in secondary market and user-friendly features, as well as the philosophy that anyone can become an artist.

In March, the company announced that the platform would not require approval for future NFT collections. While this has contributed to the rapid development of the platform, it has also led to the spread of plagiarism.

In July 2021, OpenSea processed $ 350 million worth of NFT deals. In the same month, the company raised $ 100 million in venture capital at a valuation of $ 1.5 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. In August, at the height of the NFT fever, the volume of transactions increased tenfold to $ 3.4 billion.

In September, there was a massive release of Android and iOS apps designed by OpenSea. By the end of 2021, OpenSea had raised over $ 100 million in funding.

Risks faced by the platform

Since then, deal volume has dropped to about $ 2 billion, but the platform has 1.8 million active users and a dominant market position. The company already has 70 employees and is actively hiring dozens of new ones, including much-needed technical support specialists.

Some consultants urged Finzer and Atallah to specialize in a specific niche in the NFT market, such as art, games, or music. However, the developers decided to create a platform suitable for all categories, as they could not predict what types of NFTs would become popular.

According to Finzer, OpenSea is thriving not only because it covers many areas in the NFT market, but also because it is «in the right place at the right time» and listens to what users want. The platform tracks NFTs on Ethereum on other blockchains, and all payments are made in cryptocurrencies. Sellers can set a fixed price or organize an auction, and artists can demand a percentage of the price of each resale.

Despite its sudden success, OpenSea faces various serious risks: from fraud and another NFT market crash to new competitors. In October 2021, Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange and one of OpenSea’s first investors, announced that it would launch its own peer-to-peer trading platform for NFTs.

The open market format that OpenSea follows increases the risk of counterfeiting and fraud. For example, a fraudster could copy an image of someone’s work and sell it as an NFT on OpenSea. Finzer notes that the site automatically searches for fakes, and its moderators investigate suspicious offers.

However, employees themselves can also be part of the problem. In September 2021, Finzer demanded that OpenSea’s chief product officer resign after Twitter users discovered that a crypto wallet associated with this top executive was buying NFTs shortly before they appeared on the OpenSea homepage.

Other information

In January 2022, OpenSea raised $ 300 million in a new series of financing, increasing the company’s valuation to $ 13.3 billion.

Also in January, OpenSea acquired the American company Dharma Labs.

In July 2021, Finzer was ranked 19th on Forbes' NFTu 50 list, a ranking of the most influential people in the market for irreplaceable tokens.

At the end of June 2022, Alex Atallah, co-founder of OpenSea, tweeted that he was leaving the company, while remaining on the board of directors.