OpenSea
OpenSea is an American online non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace headquartered in New York City. The company was founded by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah in 2017. OpenSea offers a marketplace allowing for non-fungible tokens to be sold directly at a fixed price, or through an auction, based on the Ethereum ERC-721 standard and the layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum Polygon. In 2021, following a heightened interest in non-fungible tokens, the company's revenue reached $95 million in February 2021 and $2.75 billion in September of that year. By January 2022, the company had been  valued at $13.3 billion and has been considered the dominant non-fungible token marketplace. History. After a 2018 pre-seed round by Y Combinator, OpenSea raised $2.1 million in venture capital (including from Animoca Brands) in November 2019. In December 2020, OpenSea announced that any user can mint NFTs on its platform for free. Later, in March 2021, OpenSea announced NFT collections would no longer need OpenSea's previous approval to be listed. This decision was later criticized for allowing rampant NFT plagiarism on the platform. On September 17, 2021, OpenSea released an app for Android and iOS . The app allows for browsing the marketplace, but not buying or selling NFTs. The same month, OpenSea admitted that an employee engaged in insider trading. OpenSea's Head of Product hoarded NFTs just before they were featured in the homepage. In January 2022, Twitter announced that it would use OpenSea’s API to let people create hexagonal shaped profile pictures of their NFTs. That month, OpenSea acquired Ethereum wallet-maker Dharma Labs,> and OpenSea reimbursed users about $1.8 million after a user interface bug allowed users to buy more than $1 million worth of NFTs at a  discount. On January 27, 2022, OpenSea announced it would limit how many NFTs a user can create using the free minting tool. The following day, OpenSea reversed the decision following user backlash and later admitted that 80% of NFTs created with the tool were plagiarism or spam. On February 19, 2022, some users began to report that some of their NFTs disappeared. OpenSea later revealed a phishing attack had took place on its platform via an exploit in the Wyvern Platform. The company denied rumors the source of the theft was their website, its listing systems, emails from the company , or an upgraded contract system. On February 20, 2022, news reporting alleged that $1.7 million in NFTs had been stolen in the phishing attack. In March 2022, OpenSea announced that it would block accounts subject to United States sanctions. In April 2022, OpenSea gave users the ability to buy and sell popular Solana NFTs on OpenSea's Solana beta. This feature was announced back in November 2021. On April 25, 2022, OpenSea announced to acquire the NFT marketplace aggregator company Gem.xyz. Attacks on the platform. In the mid of February, 2022, The Verge reported that hundreds of NFTs were  stolen from OpenSea users causing a huge panic among the platform community. The estimated value of the stolen tokens is more than $1.7 million. According to OpenSea, only 32 users had been affected. The platform's vulnerability poses a deeper question relating the security infrastructure of the existing NFT ecosystem.