OpenSea Founders Become World's First NFT Billionaires

The first Non-Fungible Token (NFT) was introduced in 2015, but it was only recently that it gained traction worldwide. With industry leaders and executives getting more and more interested in this tech trend, a couple of pioneers have made it as the world's first batch of NFT billionaires.

OpenSea founders Alex Atallah and Devin Finzer are now worth around $2.2 billion each, according to a report published by Forbes,

Finzer and Atallah founded OpenSea, an online marketplace for non-fungible tokens, in December 2017. Four years later, the online marketplace has received fresh funding that values the company at $13.3 billion.

This is a massive leap from OpenSea's $1.5 billion value just six months ago. The founders' have an estimated stake of 18.5% in OpenSea, which gives them a staggering value of $2.2 billion each, based on the publication's estimate.

OpenSea is one of the early players in the NFT market. It allows users of the platform to create, sell and buy all kinds of NFTs with a 2.5% cut for every sale. The outfit started with five people has now grown to over 4,000 active users engaging in monthly transactions worth around $1.1 million in March 2020.

OpenSea earned around $28,000 in monthly revenue for that year, but its operation changed dramatically in the early part of 2021 when other NFT platforms like Winklevoss twins’ Nifty Gateway attracted attention for auctioning high-end digital art.

In July 2021, OpenSea closed a $100 million funding round via Andreessen Horowitz capital venture firm and recorded around $350 million monthly transactions. In August 2021, the monthly transactions reached $3.4 billion, which netted the company a staggering $85 million from commissions.

Founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah are just 30 years old. Finzer worked as a software engineer on Pinterest in 2015 and co-founded his first startup called Claimdog, which he later sold to Credit Karma.

Alex Atallah graduated from Stanford and worked at Palantir. He later worked at Silicon Valley startups Whatsgodly and Zugata.