Ethereum-based NFT Marketplace OpenSea recently secured an incredible $300 million in Series C funding at a staggering $13.3 billion valuation. The latest announcement came on Tuesday, January 4, when OpenSea said the investment will help them improve the customer and community experience.
The recent funding round was led by Paradigm and Coatue with participation from a number of existing investors. OpenSea is planning to use this investment across four key areas.
- Accelerate product development
- Dramatically improve customer support and safety
- Invest in the broader NFT and Web 3 communities
- Team development
Shiva Rajaraman who recently joined OpenSea from Meta will be leading some of these major initiatives at the platform. Speaking about this development, David Fenzer, CEO and co-founder of OpenSea said:
We are focused on reducing barriers to entry for NFTs by introducing simplified features and processes to remove the complexity of blockchain. We’re also accelerating our multi-chain support and prioritizing improvements to help people discover, manage, and showcase their NFTs with better tools, analytics, and presentation.
OpenSea faces security issues
As the world’s largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea really needs to focus on some of the security issues on the platform. In one of the recent events, hackers managed to steal 15 popular NFT Bored Ape from the OpenSea platform.
All of these NFTs add up to a staggering $2.2 million. Although the OpenSea marketplace immediately suspended the buying and selling of these NFTs, it still exposes the platform’s vulnerability to external attacks.
But despite all these anomalies, OpenSea remains one of the favorite marketplaces to trade NFTs. Last weekend on January 2, OpenSea hit its all-time high single-day trading volume of $240 million. In the last month of December 2021, the world’s largest NFT market also registered its highest trading volume ever of $3 billion. OpenSea is pretty much ahead of its competitors at the moment, and this new funding will help the platform gain an even greater edge.