Interview with the co-founder of OpenSea: NFTs have truly changed the way network incentives work

OpenSea is the world's largest NFT trading market and one of the biggest winners of the NFT industry outbreak. However, since the end of last year, it has faced problems such as being criticized for not paying attention to the community, centralization, and intensifying competition.

Recently, the Stanford University encryption group Crypto@Stanford conducted an exclusive interview with Alex Atallah, co-founder and former CTO of OpenSea and alumni of Stanford University, and discussed Opensea's early history and recent strategic thinking, the pyramid in the field of Web3 security, and the competitive situation it faces. .

According to Alex Atallah, OpenSea's biggest competitive advantage is "optionality" and is working to become a broader market covering every major NFT blockchain, every type of metadata, every type of image, every types of NFT attachments.



1. Step into encryption


C@S: How did you get into encryption?

Alex: I got into crypto in the summer of 2017 because I wanted to do something on the cutting edge of technology. I've always regretted that I missed the birth of the internet. I love the history of technology and the story of the birth of the internet is so exciting. I have a crazy longing to know if something like this will ever happen again, because we did, decades before the birth of the PC. So I feel like something seems to happen from time to time in tech.

In 2017, the candidates for the "next internet" were virtual reality and encryption. The crypto space is interesting, and the community I've met here is 10 times more enthusiastic than any other internet community I've ever seen. It's also really noisy, a lot of projects are doing ICOs, and a lot of value doesn't look long-term. But I think it would be very valuable if there was any community here that was committed to long-term development and contained the same passion, excitement, and developer involvement as the rest.

Back in 2017, only a few projects met these criteria. They tend to be very low-key, and the founders just give away their tokens to see what happens with this experiment. For example, CryptoPunks is a very low-key project that distributes all its 10,000 NFTs for free, and its community grows organically around it. Other examples are Decentraland with virtual properties, or CryptoKitties.

When CryptoKitties was released, that was the first time I had a friend who wasn't interested in crypto signed up for the Metamask wallet. In that moment, I felt like "Wow, that's what you use encryption for. This is the actual building block for developers." It also felt like a new fundamental primitive of the web, very different from web pages and cryptocurrencies, There needs to be a place for people to discover them.