Paradigm and Coatue lead OpenSea's $300 million Series C financing, will retail airdrop dreams be shattered?

On January 4th, OpenSea, the world's largest NFT trading platform, announced that it has achieved a C round of $300 million financing at a post-investment valuation of $13.3 billion. The lead investors are Paradigm and Coatue, and the lead investor in the A and B rounds of financing is a16z. Did not appear in the announcement of the Series C financing.

OpenSea, established in 2017, focuses on the non-fungible token NFT trading market. It started from the concept period of blockchain application and broke out in the NFT development boom in 2021. It took 4 years to become a valuation of 13.3 billion. U.S. dollar crypto industry unicorns.

OpenSea sparked outrage after announcing a new funding round, with predictions that the platform is not far from its IPO plans. Although an IPO is the capital operation of any unicorn company, OpenSea users have been expecting the platform to issue their own crypto tokens and enter the crypto asset market sequence, not the stock market.

The main way OpenSea makes money is by charging fees to trading users, and in 2021 alone, the platform’s trading volume will increase by more than 600 times.

According to user expectations, OpenSea, which makes profits from NFT transactions generated on the blockchain, should develop towards the application direction of the Web3 era, returning the management rights of data and assets to users, and allowing users to share platform benefits, rather than going The Web2 financing method of traditional Internet companies - attracting capital by relying on traffic, and ultimately allowing institutional capital to be realized from the stock market.

As early as last December, the IPO idea of OpenSea executives angered community users, which once led an NFT community to set up an OpenDAO organization under the name of this, and issued coins for OpenSea.

After the C round of financing, the market's IPO expectations for OpenSea increased. Although the platform's CFO has stated that it will consider the suggestions of community users, the actual action is to reduce the expectations of users who are waiting for OpenSea to issue coins.



Traditional institutions dominate OpenSea’s Series C round

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Four years after its establishment, OpenSea has completed a new round of financing of $300 million. This round of financing has only been half a year since the last financing, and the valuation has also risen to $13.3 billion from $1.5 billion in the Series B financing last year.

Only lead investors Paradigm and Coatue were disclosed in OpenSea's latest funding announcement. The former Paradigm focuses on the encryption industry and Web3. It is the so-called "New Money" in the crypto circle, and it is a new investor in the history of OpenSea financing.

It is worth noting the latter Coatue, which was OpenSea's Series B funder and was ranked after a16z in the funding news at the time. The institution was originally an established hedge fund established in 1999. Later, it gradually focused on equity investment in the public market, including the technology, media and telecommunications industries.

In 2021, Coatue investment events include China's new energy vehicle developer "Ziyoujia" and VR interior design platform "Kujiale". In the past two years, Coatue's investment focus has turned to the blockchain format, and it is also an investor in smart contract and blockchain ecological security service provider "Certik".

OpenSea's most eye-catching investor a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) did not appear in the announcement of the C round of financing. The institution is the lead investor in OpenSea's two rounds of A and B financing in 2021. Under its leadership, OpenSea has successively Raised $2,300 and $100 million, bringing the world's largest NFT trading platform to a valuation of $1.5 billion after Series B financing.