Interview with OpenSea's Founder: The Creation of OpenSea and the Future of NFTs
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Interview with OpenSea's Founder: The Creation of OpenSea and the Future of NFTs
OpenSea co-founder Devin Finzer discussed his journey building OpenSea, fundraising tips, advice for founders, and the future of NFTs.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsDevin Finzer launched the NFT marketplace OpenSea in 2017, just as early NFT (non-fungible token) projects began drawing attention.
During the CryptoKitties craze, people spent over $1 million buying virtual cats on the Ethereum blockchain.
Today, led by major projects like NBA Top Shot, CryptoPunks, and Decentraland, NFTs have seen rapid growth, with the most prominent applications involving collectibles, virtual real estate, and digital art.
In 2021, NFTs truly took off—OpenSea’s GMV (gross merchandise value, or total sales volume on the platform) surged from $8 million in January to $150 million in March!
Recently, Devin participated in an insightful fireside chat where he discussed his journey building OpenSea, fundraising strategies, advice for founders, and the future of NFTs.
Q: Can you tell us about your journey from first encountering blockchain to founding OpenSea?
Devin: In 2017, I started becoming genuinely interested in cryptocurrency. I had been peripherally aware of Bitcoin, but that year I dove deep into the rabbit hole, learning the underlying technology.
At some point, I realized I wanted to tie my career to it—it became a question of what I wanted to do. As I began exploring interesting use cases in crypto, NFTs caught my attention.
CryptoKitties was one particularly fascinating example—a cultural tech phenomenon where people were spending tens of thousands of dollars buying digital cats. I was intrigued by this underdeveloped corner of crypto. When people talked about cryptocurrency, it was always about finance and money, with little exploration of other blockchain applications. I became interested in how NFTs could offer a new and unique asset class.
I pitched a rough idea to Y Combinator for a project centered on sharing Wi-Fi bandwidth via blockchain. After getting into YC, we pivoted to build OpenSea.
Q: What is OpenSea?
Devin: OpenSea is a decentralized NFT marketplace—an eBay for NFTs where you can buy, sell, auction, and more. We're also an NFT explorer, allowing users to discover any NFT on Ethereum and several other blockchains through our platform. You can also check each NFT's history, including its origin, sale locations, and more.
Q: What was your early experience building OpenSea like? What challenges did you face when few people understood NFTs?
Devin: At first, we were in an experimental phase. We had early competitors, but really, our focus was more on growing the entire market rather than winning an established one. I think we found product-market fit, but the audience was extremely small. Our users were passionate, but there weren’t many people familiar with crypto.
Still, it was incredibly exciting—that’s what kept us going. We were fascinated by what people were creating. Even though slow growth could be frustrating, we were happy working on it. Early on, we were doing $1–2 million in GMV monthly, but the user experience was terrible. Partly that was our fault, partly due to limitations in blockchain systems. There’s still a lot of friction in crypto, but it’s improving as more innovation happens in the space.
When you dive deep into crypto, you realize this space can never be shut down. I never considered doing anything else because I believe this is the next paradigm shift in technology. Plus, it’s always exciting because there are so many ways to improve the product. However, if we were chasing faster, high-growth startups, this might’ve been a problem. There was once a direct competitor that later shut down. Over the past six months, we’ve been surprised—we didn’t expect NFTs to gain such momentum. It’s thrilling, but now that more people are paying attention, the pressure has increased.
Q: On your website, OpenSea lists $354 million in trading volume, 50 million NFTs, and over 150,000 users—but only 19 employees. When did OpenSea start taking off and begin hiring more staff?
Devin: For much of 2020, we were a team of seven. Then in August 2020, we started seeing exciting growth. Our GMV was around $1 million in August, $8 million in January, $95 million in February, and $150 million in March. Suddenly, our company entered a completely different stage. We began facing technical challenges scaling the site and supporting many new users—especially given how rough our product still was. Now, we’re putting significant effort into building a strong team.
Q: Much of this hiring likely followed the new round of funding led by a16z. Can you talk about how that funding round came about?
Devin: I’d say a16z uniquely combines traditional VC with crypto-native thinking, which was very appealing to us. I’ve long admired their perspective on crypto—it goes beyond just financial views. Their vision is broader, seeing crypto as a technological phenomenon that can truly impact everything on the internet. We discussed our business with a16z, and they were excited by the growth we were seeing.
Q: What advice do you have for early-stage founders regarding fundraising?
Devin: I started fundraising with no prior experience, so hopefully this helps:
Get deeply educated about fundraising. Recommended books include *Venture Deals* and *Secrets of Sand Hill Road*.
If you don’t have strong connections, going through an accelerator is highly beneficial. YC creates an environment where many investors pay attention to you simultaneously. This allows you to create market dynamics around your raise and drive FOMO.
Investors who were former founders are invaluable for operational advice. Those who successfully built companies gave us the most useful guidance.
One mistake we made was having too many investors involved. So, depending on your situation, be selective—don’t just take money from anyone. That’s a solid strategy.
Prioritize investors who are deeply involved in the space or actually use your product.
Q: What’s your favorite NFT today? And what do you wish people would build but haven’t yet?
Devin: Personally, I’m most excited about virtual world projects where people own virtual land and can build on it. Not long ago, I wanted to buy some land but wasn’t sure which plots were good, so I consulted a virtual real estate agent who spends all day analyzing crypto real estate. To my surprise, this real economy already exists—and I find it fascinating. What I love is that it’s a stealth entry point into the metaverse, where you can own land and bring in unrelated NFTs to interact with it.
As for what I wish people would build: I’d love to see more work around concert tickets. With Covid, it hasn’t taken off yet, but tickets seem like a natural fit. One of the biggest current challenges for NFTs is transaction cost. Once those costs go down, we’ll be able to expand the range of goods that can be traded.
Q: Can you elaborate on the transaction cost challenge and what needs improvement?
Devin: A major challenge on Ethereum is that the transaction cost to buy an NFT is around $50—whether you’re buying a $5 or a $5,000 NFT. You can imagine this limits the types of NFTs people can profitably sell. At OpenSea, we’re about to launch some exciting features focused on supporting other blockchains and alternative methods to reduce high-cost transactions.
When it comes to general-purpose computing chains, Ethereum is v0. Newer versions have already introduced many improvements. If you dive into the NFT space, the user experience today feels like the early internet. To use NFTs, you must first download MetaMask, then get crypto on Coinbase, then pay transaction fees, and possibly deal with network congestion. So there’s still plenty of room for improvement.
Q: Can NFTs solve problems in physical spaces?
Devin: Absolutely. We’ve already seen several projects adopt a model where they take a physical item and issue an NFT for it. The NFT can then be traded multiple times on the blockchain, while the final buyer can redeem the physical item. This model allows people to tokenize items and create markets without physically moving the goods.
Q: Many brands like the NBA are starting to build their own NFT marketplaces. What are your thoughts on branded marketplaces? Where do you see OpenSea’s role in the future?
Devin: Ultimately, we envision ourselves supporting content from all different blockchains. Regarding other marketplaces, we anticipate many new primary markets will emerge. Where we thrive is in the long tail of smaller games and projects that need a marketplace. E-commerce offers a good analogy: there’s an official Nike store, but there’s also a thriving secondary ecosystem on eBay. I think proprietary markets will always exist, but secondary markets are equally important.
Q: How do you view business models in crypto?
Devin: It’s interesting to consider whether cross-platform symbiotic business models can exist. One cool thing about blockchains is that you can use smart contracts to create incentive structures across the system. For a rough example: you list an item for sale on a marketplace, which broadcasts a fee structure. Any marketplace that meets certain conditions gets a cut, referrers get a cut—so you can design incentives where everyone benefits. I think we’ll see more of this in the future.
Q: What are your thoughts on partnering with OpenSea?
Devin: We’ve recently begun diving deeper into primary sales. We’ve partnered with entities like the Golden State Warriors, Rob Gronkowski, and Shawn Mendes to launch NFT projects.
Q: How do you see OpenSea’s trajectory over the next 5–10 years?
Devin: We view crypto as being similar to the birth of the internet—a space full of opportunity. It may not be as massive as the internet, but we’ve seen many companies succeed, so we want to play a significant role in this new ecosystem. No one truly knows which application will become the most successful for NFTs, but we want to help make it happen. We see ourselves as the utility layer within this evolving ecosystem, aiming to be the fertile ground upon which future successful products can grow.
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