Joe Pompalino shared: After raising at a $1.5 billion valuation just six months ago, NFT marketplace OpenSea has now closed a $300M Series C at a $13.3 billion valuation.

Annual Transaction Volume:  2018: $474k; 2019: $8 million; 2020: $24 million; 2021: $15 billion.

This is a massive business.

Community Response:  OpenSea has already done over $900 million in transaction volume, which would put them on pace for over $80 billion this year. Long way to go, but that’s 5x their 2021 volume.

NFTs in its current form feel like a scam.  Unless people really need attention/recognition by displaying JPGs in the metaverse? Don’t see the point Virtual real estate is also a scam.  Gmail didn’t become dominant by charging for storage NFTs will be a great ledger system.

Shopping centres are a scam, so is tax, bank charges, the whole music and film industry, 98% of online courses, petrol, package holidays, everything is a scam when you base it on a minorities intent.

Could you elaborate? I’m really trying to understand where the value comes from I kind of understand it for Beeple’s work or Punks.  There is some chronological significance, but all the newer stuff.  It’s just like owning a file that is slightly varied from many other copies, no?

Sure, firstly I agree with your point, NFT feels scammy at first, it is not though; people are and there is no shortage of scams in the space. Like every trend, everyone wants in. The best projects are yet to come, we need a market drop and reset to get the clowns out.

I like the NFT concept/tech, as a decentralized/unbiased utility/tool to track ownership.  It will undoubtedly work well for things like IP, titles, certificates, etc I just don’t understand all the art, etc.  Some of it is legit, but it all can’t be legit.

Art is just the first use case. Look, some random Joe come sell you an oil painting for 50k, at that price I am sure you would want to validate the artist.  It is the same for NFT artists. NFTs get a bad reputation, because people lost money making investment the never validated.

Coinbase entering the space pretty soon, will be interesting to see how they deal with competition.

Coinbase should first work on their wallet app. It’s a disaster. I had to check for an update in case, I was using a really early version but no.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but at $15 billion with a 2.5% fee, that would mean the site had over $600 billion dollars’ worth of transactions this year?

Less Ponzi scheme and more a run-of-the-mill money laundering op for organized crime and parking of capital for tax avoidance by the wealthy.

This should tell you that they’re full of it.  If they make 2.5% per transaction and those are their numbers, why do they need to raise funds?

I love that Bitcoin maxis spent the last 8 years fighting off uninformed critics saying BTC was primarily used for illegal activity and money laundering, to then turn around and make the same wildly uninformed accusations about NFTs.

It’s funny how the “outside world” sees Open Sea as wildly successful.  Meanwhile the actual users can’t stand it.  There’s a massive disconnect there, and the VCs writing these checks are going to get wrecked once a viable, decentralized alternative is available this year

It’s wash trading. The real transaction volume is much lower.  What an incredible business, the growing rate of mass adoption in crypto assets will only increase these valuations; however, it remains to be seen what a fully decentralized marketplace will do to Open Sea’s business model, time will only tell.

Wondering, how you calculate the valuation on an emerging frontier like an NFT marketplace. Any idea what their revenue is on that $15bn?