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The rise and fall of OpenSea
What the NFT boom did to its biggest marketplace.
Big Mac, an attendee who only gave me his online pseudonym (crypto has a strong culture of anonymity), said that instead of the NFT “Super Bowl,” the conference felt more like the “preseason.” And Tom Smith, who was manning a booth that hawked NFTs of anthropomorphized cannabis plants, was even more direct: “It seems really freakin’ dead.” Interviews with 18 current and former employees, as well as internal company documents and conversations with investors, artists, and other stakeholders in the NFT industry, illustrate how a startup inspired by cat JPEGs has morphed into what one former staffer called a “lite” version of Meta that seems lost between the cultures of Big Tech and crypto. Christa Laser, a professor at Cleveland State University who’s also researched crypto’s intersection with the law, said that, while the FTC’s information requests may stem from suspicions surrounding OpenSea itself, its interest in the NFT marketplace may simply be an attempt for the regulator to better understand an emerging market.
Or read this on The Verge
