Opensea

OpenSea is the world’s first and largest peer-to-peer marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and digital assets. Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah built it on Ethereum as a place to buy, sell, and discover NFTs, a concept barely known in mainstream conversation then. Think of it as eBay for digital ownership on the blockchain. Instead of physical goods exchanging hands, users trade verifiable, blockchain-recorded assets that never leave their wallets during the process.

OpenSea supports a wide range of NFT transactions, including primary sales through its launchpad, secondary market trading, and direct peer-to-peer swaps. Beyond collectibles, the platform handles digital art, gaming assets, virtual real estate, and domain names. Users connect a crypto wallet or create one with an email address to buy, sell, mint, swap, and bridge cryptocurrencies and NFTs without leaving the platform. The core infrastructure runs on Seaport, an open-source smart contract protocol that enables trading any combination of Ethereum-based assets in a single transaction. This non-custodial design means OpenSea never holds your assets; you do.

Finzer and Atallah founded OpenSea in December 2017, inspired by CryptoKitties, a blockchain-based game featuring non-fungible tokens released earlier that year. Y Combinator accepted OpenSea into its accelerator program in 2018, and the platform raised $2.1 million in venture capital in November 2019. Growth was modest at first. By March 2020, the platform had 4,000 active users completing $1.1 million in transactions per month. Then the NFT boom hit.

At its peak in January 2022, OpenSea facilitated over $5 billion in a single month of trading volume. The daily trading volume reached $2.7 billion on May 1, 2022. That year, cumulative volume crossed $10 billion. The platform briefly commanded around 90% of the global NFT marketplace. The years that followed brought fierce competition from Blur and Magic Eden, a Wells Notice from the SEC in August 2024, and a significant decline in market share. OpenSea responded by rebuilding the entire platform from the ground up.

OS2, its complete rebuild launched in February 2025, transformed OpenSea from an NFT-only marketplace into a multi-chain digital asset hub trading both NFTs and fungible tokens. OS2 supports token and NFT trading across 22 blockchains, with improved search, aggregated marketplace listings, cross-chain purchasing, lower fees, and a gamified rewards system called Voyages. The SEC closed its investigation in February 2025 without enforcement action. With over 467,000 monthly active users by May 2025 and $2.6 billion in October 2025 trading volume, OpenSea staged one of the most significant product comebacks in Web3.

OpenSea’s investor roster reads like a who’s who of crypto and mainstream venture capital. In March 2021, OpenSea raised $23 million in Series A funding through Andreessen Horowitz. The round also included angel investors like Naval Ravikant, Mark Cuban, Tim Ferriss, Alexis Ohanian, and Balaji Srinivasan, alongside crypto-native investors Standard Crypto, Linda Xie, Avichal Garg, and Flamingo DAO. The Series B round in July 2021 raised $100 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Creative Artists Agency and Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures. The Series C in January 2022 raised $300 million and was led by Paradigm and Coatue, valuing the company at $13.3 billion. In total, OpenSea has raised approximately $427 million across all funding rounds.

OpenSea is a private company. Its shares are not listed on any public stock exchange, so you cannot buy them through a brokerage account. If you want exposure to OpenSea before any potential IPO, you can buy pre-IPO stock as direct shares or SAFE notes from the OpenSea team or existing shareholders. Acquire.Fi OTC and Secondaries Marketplace is purpose-built for this kind of transaction.

On Acquire.Fi, you can buy OpenSea pre-IPO stock by engaging with existing listings in the marketplace or by submitting a new “Buy” listing at your preferred valuation and share amount using the Buy form. If you already hold a position and want to exit, you can sell OpenSea pre-IPO stock just as easily. Sellers can engage with active buy listings or submit a new “Sell” listing with their preferred terms through the Sell form.

Once you submit your listing, Acquire.Fi handles the process from there. The team runs background checks, sends NDAs, and introduces counterparties. Buyers and sellers are responsible for their own due diligence and payment settlement. Acquire.Fi is not a broker-dealer, but the team will assist at every stage to give the deal the best chance of closing successfully.