OpenSea now valued at $13.3B 🤯; Nubank adds Games, Travel & Pets to its Super App📱; Institution-friendly DeFi initiative Aave Arc goes live 👀

Good Morning FinTech, January 6

Good morning Everyone,

And happy Thursday! The week is almost over, but don’t go chillax just yet because I’ve prepared 3 super interesting FinTech stories you cannot miss today:

OpenSea now valued at $13.3B 🤯

Bags of cash💰 OpenSea has raised $300M in a Series C funding round led by Paradigm and Coatue, taking the NFT marketplace's total valuation to a whopping $13.3B.

The firm’s valuation has literally ballooned as it surged from a mere $1.5B it was given just 6 months ago by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm. That’s nuts! 🥜

The USP 🥊 One can remember that OpenSea is a digital market based on the Wyvern Protocol, which comprises custom-built Ethereum smart contracts that are expressly created for buying and selling unique digital assets. The marketplace was established in 2018.

Currently, the company is an absolute leader in its domain.

Following the trends 📈 OpenSeas’s growth is a good illustration of the massive demand for crypto-collectibles as in 2021, NFTs played a major role in the mainstream success of the overall blockchain sector. The industry recorded over $14B in sales during the year, with digital art collections and digital collectibles accounting for 91% of transactions.

The NFT platform has massively benefited from this. OpenSea saw more than $2.4B in transaction volume in the past 30 days alone, hauling in some hundreds of millions in fees last year.

But the most important question is can it sustain such growth? Well, it’s going to be different in 2022…