They don’t come much bigger than Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16z, which announced that it was leading a $23 million Series A round for OpenSea, a popular NFT marketplace.
According to the announcement, angel investors Ron Conway, Mark Cuban, Tim Ferriss, Belinda Johnson, Naval Ravikant, Ben Silberman, and others will be joining the funding round.
General Partner at A16z Katie Haun, who penned the announcement, praised the move adding that the platform provides the needed link between the consumer and infrastructure layers for digital goods.
If 2020 was the year for DeFi, then 2021 has been the year for NFTs with record breaking sales such as Beeple’s “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” digital collage fetching almost $70 million at a Christie’s auction.
The venture capital firm acknowledged this growth stating:
“Today there are more than 3 million NFTs for sale, and sales volume on the top sources has grown over 400x year over year to more than $100 million per week. NFTs are breaking out to more mainstream audiences, and represent an entirely new economy based on digital ownership.”
It added that OpenSea provides a one-stop-shop to discover, buy, and sell any non-fungible digital asset while providing additional information about a particular NFT.
Andreessen Horowitz, which has previously invested in Coinbase, Maker DAO, and more recently the Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions provider Optimism, added;
“Given the importance of this consumer layer in such a fast-growing area, it’s no surprise that OpenSea’s growth has been off the charts, with transaction volume growing 100x in the last six months.”
Non-fungible tokens are now competing with DeFi in terms of headlines as the frenzy, which has been compared to Tulipmania, continues.
To epitomize the tulip type nature of the current NFT ecosystem, digital artist known as “jtbxl” has released a collection of 113 crypto tulips on the OpenSea platform.
Pro skateboarding legend Tony Hawk is the latest celebrity jumping on the NFT bandwagon as he has announced the release of a tokenized video of his final ever 540-degree ollie.
Finally, according to a recent report, the U.S. tax authorities are already eyeing NFT’s for taxation purposes on crypto gains so there is no escape even if you do buy a Wrapped MoonCat and make a profit.