Former NFT Specialist OpenSea Is Remaking Itself Into A Crypto Trading Aggregator

Forbes

The crash of the NFT market led OpenSea to fire more than half of its staff. But the startup has reinvented itself into a place for buying and selling all tokens, including memecoins, and trading volume is surging once again  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2025/10/15/former-nft-specialist-opensea-is-remaking-itself-into-a-crypto-trading-aggregator/  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Today on Forbes, former NFT specialist OpenSea is remaking itself into a crypto trading aggregator.

00:09As crypto receives a warm embrace in Washington and token prices rise to new levels,

00:14some once hot digital asset sectors like NFTs continue to languish. Few firms have suffered

00:21the brunt of NFT's collapse more than NFT specialist OpenSea. Starting in mid-2022,

00:28the market for digital art represented by these unique non-fungible tokens, or NFTs,

00:33from crypto punks to bored apes, experienced a spectacular fall, declining by more than 80%.

00:40By October 2023, OpenSea, the once dominant venue for buying and selling NFTs,

00:47was bringing in just $3 million in monthly revenue, down from a peak of $125 million in January 2022,

00:55the same month the startup was valued at $13.3 billion, briefly giving its co-founders ownership

01:01stakes worth more than $2 billion. It wasn't just that people had lost interest in NFTs.

01:07OpenSea had also been abruptly overtaken by an upstart competitor, Blur, which charged zero trading

01:14fees and didn't require buyers to pay royalties to NFT creators. When OpenSea responded by loosening

01:20its own royalty policy, it drew the ire of its customers on Twitter, who said everything from

01:25quote, you people are foul, to characterizing it as quote, evil, and quote, a joke of a company.

01:33As OpenSea was hemorrhaging cash and struggling for market share, co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer

01:39held a company meeting for 175 staffers on payroll. He told employees that the company needed a reset,

01:46and that he would be firing more than half of them. His goal, to emerge again as a smaller,

01:51nimbler startup, where every remaining employee was enthusiastic about reinventing the company.

01:57Finzer offered severance packages to anyone who hadn't been laid off, but also wanted out.

02:03Today, looking downward, voice groggy, likely from his seven-day-a-week work schedule,

02:08he says quote, what was really tough was that a lot more people than I expected,

02:12some really good people, took that package. CEO Finzer now operates often from a WeWork-like

02:19co-working space in downtown Manhattan. About six other New York-area employees are office regulars,

02:25but nearly all of OpenSea's 60 employees and 10 contractors today work remotely.

02:31After trudging through a three-year bear market for digital art NFTs that may never bounce back,

02:36OpenSea is pivoting hard. Taking advantage of its customer base,

02:41which had swelled to millions of monthly website visitors, the battle-worn startup has expanded from

02:46NFTs to become a one-stop shop for trading all cryptocurrencies across 22 different blockchains.

02:52This shift means OpenSea can cash in on the meme coin craze, too.

02:57Finzer, who is 34 years old, credits his wife Yuqi Lira Kuo with having the idea to

03:03turn OpenSea into a trade-any-crypto application. Kuo is an early cryptocurrency investor, who pursued

03:09a PhD in philosophy and politics at Princeton, earned a Harvard Law degree, and in 2016 began

03:15running a crypto trading fund. In 2021, Kuo left the trading fund and met Finzer later that year.

03:22Finzer says, quote, I really consider her a silent co-founder of OpenSea 2.0.

03:28OpenSea's new focus is already showing real traction. In the first two weeks of October 2025,

03:35it facilitated $1.6 billion in cryptocurrency trades and $230 million in NFT transactions,

03:42up from $142 million in total volume in all of May.

03:47The surge will make October 2025 its biggest month in over three years.

03:52Under OpenSea's new game plan, it aggregates buy and sell orders from decentralized crypto exchanges

03:58like Uniswap and Meteora. In terms of fees, OpenSea takes about 0.9% for every transaction,

04:05accounting for $16 million in revenue over the first two weeks of October.

04:11Finzer's new focus for OpenSea is occurring as the soaring price of Bitcoin makes headlines,

04:16crypto goes mainstream, and prediction markets gain in popularity.

04:21Even though slumping market values for NFTs like the Bored Ape Yacht Club,

04:25whose average floor price has fallen from around $400,000 at its peak to $32,000 today,

04:31have burned many investors, a new crop of speculators remains undeterred.

04:37For the past two years, meme coins have been the industry's biggest obsession.

04:41Finzer says, quote, you can't fight the macro trend.

04:45So, he adds, you might as well embrace it.

04:50For full coverage, check out Jeff Coughlin's piece on Forbes.com.

04:55This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.

05:06I'll see you back to the next one.

05:07I'm 0.1211.

05:07I'm 0.2211.

05:07I'm 0.2212.

05:09I'm 0.3212.

05:10I'm 0.3212.

05:10To the next one.

05:11I'm 0.2211.

05:11The second one has fallen from the market at the same time,

05:12I'm 0.2282.

05:13I'm 0.3222.

05:14I'm 0.4222.

05:15I'm 0.4222.

05:16I'm 0.3222.

05:16I'm 0.4222.

05:17I'm 0.6222.

05:17I'm 0.3222.

05:18I'm 0.5222.

05:19I'm 0.5232.

05:20I'm 0.5233.

05:21And what I'm 0.4222.

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