By Shelly Melancon (Switzerland)
Top venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z) is among the top financiers in OpenSea’s quest for new funds. OpenSea is a leading firm in digital collectibles in the NFT marketplace.
A statement from the firm showed that they lead a $23-million series funding round for OpenSea. Some angel investors participating in the funding round include Ben Silberman (Pinterest CEO), Naval Ravikant (Co-Founder and Chairman, AngelList), Belinda Johnson (the only Top-Ranked Woman in Airbnb and the company’s first Chief Operating Officer), Tim Ferriss (Famed Author Of The 4-Hour Work Week), Mark Cuban (Owner, Dallas Mavericks), Alexis Ohanian (Co-Founder, Reddit) and Ron Conway (SV Angel Founder), while A16z’s cultural leadership fund is one other firm participating in the funding series. Other VC-investors looking to buy into OpenSea include Linda Xie (Co-Founder Scalar Capital), Balaji Srinivasan (Former CTO of Coinbase), and Andrew Steinwold (Co-Partner at Sfermion and a crypto enthusiast).
Why A16z Is Investing in OpenSea
Kati Haun, a16z general partner revealed that OpenSea allows the search, use, and organization of NFTs to be easy. Katie continued by saying, “OpenSea also provides an important service of integrating platforms in the marketplace together similar to the service that eBay and Amazon provide.”
The venture capital firm remarked that OpenSea’s exponential growth can be associated with their decision to offer full support to the NFT marketplace. Ever since they started providing that support, their transaction volume has been out of the ordinary – all of which had happened in less than six months.
Also, a16z eulogized the leadership of the rare digital items and crypto-collectibles company, especially their CTO and CEO (Alex Atallah and Devin Finzer respectively). Andreessen Horowitz has investments in several crypto assets, mainly because they were a few of the first venture capital companies to start investing in crypto assets.
Three of their top crypto-asset investments are Coinbase, Maker Dao, and Libra. Late last month, the California-based venture capitalists also backed optimum’s layer 2 (L2) scaling solution. This solution is an Ethereum-built protocol that utilizes optimistic rollups to reduce fees and latency on the Ethereum main-net. The firm sells all kinds of rare digital items such as domain names for Ethereum wallets and digital real estate on Decentraland.
Moving Along an Unfamiliar Territory
OpenSea’s ingenuity in connecting the crypto, artistic and creative worlds might be the reason they are attracting interests from elites outside the crypto market as previously mentioned. Even though OpenSea’s CEO and co-founder, David Finzer’s conviction about the NFT-mania were never in doubt, he was bewildered by the massive surge in NFT activities over the past few weeks.
Finzer said, “broad and big this fast? We never expected it.” Finzer added, “Fungibility makes any legal tender substitutable with another one, but non-fungibility makes preserves the uniqueness of any item, especially when it’s a collectible item. For instance, when a movie theater pass is turned into an NFT, it doesn’t represent the same value as a ticket to the super bowl even if it has expired. Thus, non-fungible tokens represent items recorded on the blockchain to preserve their provenance.”
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