OpenSea, the world’s top non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, has strongly refuted claims that it intends to pursue a public listing any time soon.
The fast-spreading rumors erupted last week when Brian Roberts, Chief Financial officer at OpenSea, told Bloomberg in an interview that “it would be foolish not to think about going public.”
The short statement attracted uproar among OpenSea’s crypto community, many of whom strongly believe public listing simply means selling out to large institutional investors. However, it is worth noting that many users on OpenSea execute transactions below $10,000 at a time.
Among those who raised their uproar on Twitter was user @Punk_2070, writing:
“Sucks to hear @opensea is selling out and doing an IPO, Just another reason why I can’t wait for @Coinbase_NFT. If we are using corporate vehicles, we might as well use the one that won’t go down three times a week.”
Many users also said that through share market listing, the NFT platform would airdrop governance tokens to long-serving community members like Uniswap.
No surprise that OpenSea is doing an IPO instead of community governance.
Anyone who’s had the displeasure of speaking with OpenSea community support would know that OpenSea doesn’t care about community at all.
They’re not web3, they’re tradfi 2.0
— davis 🐺🦊 (@basedkarbon) December 6, 2021
But, in a December 8 blog post, Roberts confirmed that OpenSea has no imminent plans to file a public listing anytime soon, citing misunderstanding and inaccurate reporting:
“Let me set the record straight: there is a big gap between thinking about what an IPO might eventually look like & actively planning one. We are not planning an IPO, and if we ever did, we would look to involve the community.”
Nonetheless, regardless of whether OpenSea will be listed on stock markets or not, the NFT marketplace is a hot deal. The NFT platform garnered over $2 billion in trading volume from 1.1 million transactions and nearly 250,000 users in the past 30 days. It also took 2.5% from every trade, making over $50 million in revenue in the same period.
Roberts joined OpenSea as the first CFO after resigning from Lyft earlier last week. He is experienced in tech and retail, having also previously worked for Walmart and Microsoft.
