OpenSea takes back IPO plan after user community backlash
The world’s top NFT marketplace, OpenSea, has recently denied its intention of pursuing a public listing any time soon.
Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Brian Roberts had sparked a public backlash in the week, telling Bloomberg that it would be rather “foolish not to think about going public.”
The CFO’s statement triggered an uproar among OpenSea’s crypto native NFT community, several of whom view public listing as a sell-out to large institutional investors. The majority of OpenSea users execute transactions below $10,000 at a time.
Users were seen miffed on social media that a share market listing would confirm that the platform was planning airdropping governance tokens for longstanding community members, similarly like Uniswap.
However, Roberts apparently views the entire episode as a grave misunderstanding, blaming “inaccurate reporting” of the firm’s plans. He was noted saying that there is “a big gap” that exists between thinking what an IPO might actually look like and actively planning one, adding that they “are not planning an IPO” and that if they ever did, they would want to “involve the community.”
Whether it is governed by the community or even listed publicly on the stock market, the OpenSea NFT marketplace is hot property, that has recorded $2 billion in trading volume from its 1.1 million transactions and about 250,000 users in the past 30 days alone. The platform takes 2.5 per cent from each trade, which means that it earned over $50 million in revenue within that time period.
Roberts has become OpenSea’s first CFO after he resigned from Lyft earlier in the week. He has prior experience in tech and retail, his previous works including Walmart and Microsoft.
