NFT exchange OpenSea made just $28,000 a month when it launched 4 years ago. Now its founders are about to be crypto billionaires, said Forbes.
Today in NFTs
OpenSea founders, Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah decided it would fold if sales did not double by the end of 2020 - then hit that goal by September of that year. Now in 2021, the company transacts billions of dollars in NFTs per month.
The doubling of revenue in 2020, 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).
With the explosion of the NFT marketplace, Finzer and Atallah have scored a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and are soon to be the newest billionaires in the crypto world, Forbes wrote.
The marketplace for NFTs, in general, has ballooned this year. In the third quarter
alone, NFTs registered $10.7 billion in trading volume - a 704% pump 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.”
Damien Hirst Turns Drake’s ‘Certified Lover Boy’ Cover Art Into a Series of 10,000 NFTs.
According to Decrypt, those who are holders of Hirst’s The Currency Collection, which launched earlier this summer in July, were “airdropped” these new NFTs for free. Titled Great Expectations, these NFT collectables were not available for public sale. Hirst announced in a series of ten Tweets his reason for doing so claiming:
“Everything done well is art. With Drake’s support and blessing, I’ve created this free Thanksgiving gift for all Currency NFT holders; it’s loosely based on the album cover I made for Drake.”
Each of the 10,000 NFTs in the collection follows the same grid that depicted the original 12 Emoji-like pregnant women on the album cover. The changes he made were varying the style of the women, changing colour palettes, backgrounds, hair types, and adding accessories like handbags and party hats. Some even have a skull or flame replacing the face of the women.