NFT platform OpenSea intends to IPO! Community dissatisfaction: abandon users in order to attract investors

Brian Roberts, the former chief financial officer (CFO) of Lyft, the American car-hailing service giant, has joined the well-known NFT trading platform OpenSea. He also plans to promote the company's listing in order to facilitate the company's continued business expansion. After the news came out, there was a strong backlash from the NFT community.

OpenSea, the world's largest NFT trading platform, has appointed Brian Roberts as the company's chief financial officer. Prior to this, Brian Roberts had worked in Microsoft, Wal-Mart and other companies in the early days. After joining Lyft, he led the company to grow rapidly and was finally able to successfully IPO.

In an interview with Bloomberg recently, Brian Roberts revealed that although his experience in the cryptocurrency industry is not rich, he said that OpenSea may start an IPO in the short term, which means that the company may be listed on the stock exchange. Public offering and listing. Brian Roberts said that considering the rapid development of the OpenSea platform, it would be too stupid to not consider public listing.

In this regard, OpenSea founder and CEO Devin Finzer also confirmed that the team is discussing financing issues with investors and is still identifying future investors, including: a16z, Founders Fund, Coinbase and Blockchain Capital.

OpenSea is currently the most popular and the world’s largest comprehensive NFT trading platform. Users can cast, display, trade, and auction NFTs on the platform. Most of the Ethereum NFT transactions are carried out on OpenSea. In August of this year, OpenSea The transaction volume set a record of US$3.4 billion.

Although Brian Roberts is committed to promoting the listing of OpenSea, NFT collectors and artists are not happy to see this situation. Several celebrities have expressed disappointment at the news that OpenSea is going to be listed.

Previously, the cryptocurrency community generally believed that OpenSea might issue governance tokens and then allocate some tokens to airdrops to old users. However, since OpenSea is planning an IPO, this means that the possibility of the former seems to be small. Instead, the company is seeking to raise more funds from investors.

According to Brian Roberts, the company does not need to raise more cash, but hopes to acquire companies, establish partnerships and establish joint ventures through IPO financing to further expand the adoption of NFTs into new industries.

In this regard, many OpenSea users and NFT collectors believe that this is equivalent to abandoning users in order to attract investors. Some people think that if there was no support from the community, OpenSea would not have achieved what it is today.

A Twitter user with the account Punk_2070 wrote: It’s terrible to hear that OpenSea is planning to sell shares and conduct an IPO. We made OpenSea today, not those venture capital institutions. Another netizen basedkarbon commented that I believe those who have been dissatisfied with the OpenSea community customer service know that OpenSea does not care about the community at all.