There will be two stages for the merge to be public in the crypto market- Stage 1: Bellatrix, happening on September 6. Stage 2: Paris, happening between 10 & 20 September.   Fact, it could result in a 99.95% reduction in total energy use, with proof-of-stake being ~2000x more energy-efficient than proof-of-work.

OpenSea is perhaps the market leader in NFT exchanges. Here is their story- 

• Devin Finzer had just sold his company, Claimdog, to Credit Karma. He got into the crypto rabbit hole while working for Credit Karma & got fascinated by the potential of blockchain. 

• He met Alex Atallah, a computer science undergrad who had experience in building social networks & a crypto enthusiast. 

• Both of them participated in a hackathon organised by Techcrunch, where they did a project called Wificoin, in which a user can earn coins by simply sharing his router with others. 

• They got into Y-Combinator for Wificoin despite the scepticism Web 3 faced during the same time. 

• 28th November 2017 was the official launch of CryptoKitties, which marked a special day for the whole crypto community & of course, for Devin & Alex. The unique thing was that CryptoKitties were not just images but a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) built on a standard protocol called ERC-721.

ERC-721 is an underlying infrastructure like the ground floor of a building. “A standard for digital assets”.

Around 2018 & 2019,

• Finzer & Attalah dropped Wificoin to work on building a marketplace inspired by the ERC-721 standard protocol. 

• OpenSea or “eBay for crypto goods.” was born. However, they were not alone in the party of exchanging digital assets. Rarebits was one of the main competitors. 

• After Y-combinator, they raised $2 million of funding & kept a lean team focused on attracting new projects for their platform by joining Discord communities. 

• A lean team focused on the core product & charging a small fee made them a market leader.

Around 2020-2022:

• The market of “pfp” or profile pictures NFTs boomed. Projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, Meebits, etc., gained much interest. 

• Till 2020, OpenSea had a lean team of just 7 people.

• They successfully raised $100 million in Series B (2021) from world-class investors like a16z, Paradigm, etc. 

• There was a broad division into eight categories: art, music, domain names, virtual worlds, trading cards, collectables, sports, and utility.

• Robust filtering helped users to search the information for an NFT project.

• NFT sales went up to $94.8 million in 2020 & reached roughly $24.9 billion in 2021.

• OpenSea alone surpassed $5 billion in volume for 2021 with one million+ active users.

Present:

After its latest round of funding of $300 million in Series C, OpenSea is now valued at $13.3 billion. In the second quarter of 2022, April volume went to $3.2 billion, an almost 30% increase from March 2022.

Many competitors, like MagicEden, Foundation, Rarible, etc., entered the space, but it still leads the Market for NFTs. 

Good competition brings challenges, and for OpenSea, it is to successfully catalog various art categories and work on customer feedback by relentlessly improving & innovating the product. The opportunity is to capture as much of that growing volume as possible.

In short, a strong team with a macro mindset and an early mover advantage led OpenSea to become a leading NFT marketplace. 

For a fact, NFTs are just getting started. :)