OpenSea, one of the most prominent hubs for NFT collection mints and secondary trading, announced a Series C funding round for $300M. The funding values OpenSea at more than $13B.
The platform aims to expand its team, accelerate product development and fund projects in the space. Additionally, OpenSea will add better customer support, to serve the growing complexity of NFT trading.
The platform will also offer creator grants to allow new artists to make use of the NFT space, while covering expenses such as gas fees. A selection of artists also may solve the problem of copied collections or faked NFTs.
OpenSea Boosts Play to Earn
Multiple play to earn projects start their lifecycles with an NFT collection. Pre-sales of digital land, cards or characters is one of the sources of funding for game developers.
Some of the biggest markets on OpenSea are for digital land, where projects like The Sandbox and Decentraland (MANA) command relatively high minimal prices of 3-6 ETH.
Stolen Items Challenge OpenSea
Despite the secure character of cryptography, NFTs are highly secure. However, human error or malicious sites can also lead to losses.
OpenSea recently locked a collection of Bored Apes, after receiving a signal for selling stolen items. Potential attacks can happen by forced wallet connections, where the user is asked to sign a series of transactions. A smart contract can access all assets and cause tokens to move.
The actual images of the apes may be stored on OpenSea servers, making it easier to locate the full asset. Some of the stolen tokens also get returned, as they can be easily blacklisted to prevent the incentive for art theft.
Bored Apes is one of the high profile collections on OpenSea, with significant price action.
The Bored Apes model may also evolve into a play to earn game in the coming year. Bored Apes, with a widening real-world community, have also helped generate physical products. With highly active marketing, Bored Ape images have also been used as rewards in other games, using the mystery box play mechanic.
