Growth and acquisitions (2022–2024)
In early January 2022, OpenSea raised an additional $300 million in Series C funding through Paradigm and Coatue Management, among other investors. The company was valued at $13.3 billion.[8] [9][10] Later that month, OpenSea acquired Ethereum wallet-maker Dharma Labs.[11][12]
Towards the end of January, OpenSea reimbursed users about $1.8 million after a user interface bug allowed users to buy more than $1 million worth of NFTs at a discount.[13][14]
On February 19, 2022, some users began to report that some of their NFTs disappeared. OpenSea later revealed a phishing attack had taken place on its platform via an exploit in the Wyvern Platform.[15] The next day, The Verge reported that hundreds of NFTs were stolen from OpenSea users causing a huge panic among the platform community. The estimated value of the stolen tokens was more than $1.7 million. According to OpenSea, only 32 users had been affected. OpenSea later revised its statement to note that 17 users were directly affected, while the other 15 users had interacted with the attacker but had not lost tokens as a result.[16]
In March 2022, OpenSea confirmed that it was blocking accounts in countries that are subject to United States sanctions.[17]
On April 25, 2022, OpenSea announced the acquisition of the NFT marketplace aggregator company Gem.xyz.[18]
The daily trading volume on the OpenSea marketplace reached a peak of $2.7 billion on May 1, 2022, but had dropped by 99%, to just $9.34 million on August 28, with daily users down to 24,020.[19][20][21]
On June 30, 2022, OpenSea reported an email data breach after a senior engineer at an email vendor, Customer.io, misused access to share 1.8 million OpenSea user email addresses with an "external bad actor."[22]
On July 14, 2022, chief executive Devin Finzer tweeted that the company was cutting one in five of its employees.[23][24]
