NFT exchange OpenSea made just $28,000 a month when it launched 4 years ago. Now its founders are about to be crypto billionaires.

November 28, 2021

NFT exchange OpenSea made just $28,000 a month when it launched 4 years ago. Now its founders are about to be crypto billionaires.

NFT marketplace OpenSea made a meager $28,000 per month in revenue two years ago, Forbes reported.
Its founders decided it would fold if sales didn't double by the end of 2020 — then hit that goal by September of that year.
Now, the company transacts billions of dollars in NFTs per month.

After two years in operation, the founders of OpenSea, an exchange for non-fungible tokens, were nearing a make-or-break moment.

By March 2020, the platform was still only making a meager $28,000 in commission revenue per month since launching in December 2017, Forbes reported in a November 23 profile titled "What Every Crypto Buyer Should Know About OpenSea, The King Of The NFT Market."

The founders — 31-year-old Devin Finzer and 29-year-old Alex Atallah — said the market for NFTs felt dead and planned on folding if business hadn't doubled by year-end, according to the article.

By September 2020, they met that goal, Forbes wrote.

The doubling in revenue, which is derived from a 2.5% commission on transactions, was just a precursor of what was to come.

OpenSea, now the largest NFT marketplace by trading volume, jumped from $1.1 million in transactions per month when it was struggling to get started, to an all-time high of $3.4 billion in August 2021 (producing $85 million in commission revenue), Forbes said.

With the explosion of the NFT marketplace, Finzer and Atallah have scored a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and they're soon to be the newest billionaires in the crypto world, Forbes wrote.

Since its days as a little-known operation, OpenSea has become the go-to marketplace for NFTs, selling collections like CryptoPunks, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Decentraland, and even a tungsten cube.

NFTs are digital assets like artwork tied to the blockchain. While bitcoin tokens are fungible, or replicable, NFTs derive their value from the fact that they're one-of-a-kind. Some skeptics, however, say there's no value, and they can simply right-click and save the image.

Even so, the marketplace for NFTs has ballooned this year. In the third-quarter alone, NFTs registered $10.7 billion in trading volume – a 704% jump from about $2 billion the previous quarter.

In the interview with Forbes, Finzer said OpenSea succeeded by "being in the right place at the right time."

Read the original article on Business Insider