OpenSea Marketplace Launched A New Grants Program

OpenSea Marketplace launched a new grants program and will now invest in startups via the Ventures Division as well as other support-community-driven projects so let’s find out more in today’s latest cryptocurrency news.

The Opensea Marketplace launched an investment arm as well as community grants program. The platform is valued at $13.3 billion and generated more than $5 billion in NFT trading volume. OpenSea the leading marketplace in the NFT industry announced that it will launch an investment arm to fund Web3 startups and projects as well as community grants program to support the community initiatives which will benefit the wider Web3 and NFT ecosystem.

OpenSea Ventures will provide more funding, technical support, advice, and strategic connections alike to portfolio companies. The initaitive will be led by OpenSea co-founder Alex Attalah and it will also provide access to partners and investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Katie Haun, 3LAU, And Animoca Brands. According to the announcement, the investment arm will focus on four key themes and will include the shift to a multi-chain world for fungible and non-fungible tokens. NFT-related protocols, Web3 gaming, and social projects as well as NFT aggregators and analytics platforms that support both OpenSea and other marketplaces.

OpenSea Ventures as the company which aims to support projects and emerging from the Web3 community in its ecosystem grants initaitive, it also aims to support the projects that can improve user accessibility and developer tooling around NFTs but also create educational resources and promote accessibility and inclusivity. OpenSea is looking to support short-term projects which can be launched within two quarters from getting the grant but the company will evolve the criteria and expand focus over time. The company plans to establish a review committee and announce the details and criteria before choosing the first set of grantees.

NFTs act like a deed of ownership to a unique digital item and can represent things such as profile pictures, video-based collectibles, digital illustrations, and much more. The wider NFT market generated $25 billion worth of tradign volume in 2021 as per the data on DappRadar and we can also see that OpenSEa was responsible for a majority of the figure as tradign surges in the half of the year. Today’s announcement came after a record month of tradign volume for the platform which registered more than $5 billion worth between Polygon and Ethereum in January. That beat the previous combined record of less than $3.5 billion when the NFT market started surging to new heights.

OpenSea announced a $300 million Series C round which values the startup at $13.3 billion led by Coatue and Paradigm which is an increase in valuation from its Series B round that brought in $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuations.