Some news: I’ll be stepping away from OpenSea next month, but remain on the board.

With a team in place that I trust &amp; our new VP of Eng, @markoiskander, joining next week, I’m ready to build again from 0 to 1.

More in the update I shared with the team: https://mirror.xyz/alexatallah.eth/-8HvcUeO6wkrzV5xLR-Uv_OljE_Xci1yI6jUBGYJvmU

Just finished @SamHarrisOrg's mindfulness series in @wakingup - highly recommended.

Most meditation practices seem to assume you're already motivated to practice every day, but at least for me, this isn't usually the case. 1/

Sam interleaves guided meditation sessions with 10-minute lectures that constantly reinforce the "why" behind mindfulness, along with techniques for decoupling your ego from your thoughts.

For me, this is a critical step towards living in the present. 2/

One great and somewhat contrarian lecture (worth discussion) cautions you on taking too much pride in your practice and even your own humility.

There's a neat product discussion at the end about why "streaks" in wellness apps are an anti-pattern: https://dynamic.wakingup.com/course/CF485A?source=content%20share&share_id=78BF2447&pack=P29170 3/

The calming background audio that you can turn on for any lecture is a bit buggy atm but a very nice touch overall.

The app also has lectures from many different teachers and conversations about life philosophies, includes one with @willmacaskill about effective altruism. 4/

I haven't finished exploring it, but if you've been using the app for a while, I'm curious about your experiences and how they compare to other practices.

My experience with Waking Up

1/ There are now more NFTs on OpenSea than there were websites on the internet in 2010.

Very soon, NFTs will outnumber websites, maybe even webpages. This growth has major implications for how we should index NFTs...

2/ Some context:

• In the year 2000, there were 17 million websites &amp; 400m users online

• In 2010, there were ~200 million websites &amp; ~2b users https://bit.ly/375IbM8

• Today, there are nearly 250 million searchable NFTs on OpenSea, &amp; just a sliver of the internet's users

3/ The # of NFTs known to OpenSea grew 17x in just the past year. And it only covers Ethereum, Polygon, and Klaytn.

Compare it to ~20 billion pages (and declining) in Google’s index over the last few years:
https://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ 

4/ An added factor is that, unlike webpages, many NFTs will exist as long as the blockchain exists.

Creators don’t need to pay annual fees to rent a domain name, and on-chain metadata doesn’t even require a separate server.

5/ While scarcity is a key property of NFTs, it doesn’t limit the number of projects that we’ll see.

Developers are constantly innovating, and diff blockchains will be used for diff reasons (e.g. Polygon is often used for gaming today, while Ethereum is seeing more avatar art).

6/ All this means:

There may eventually be MANY more NFTs than webpages on the internet.

It will be an exciting new challenge to help users find the NFTs they’re looking for, regardless of chain. Using on-chain data to score results will require brand new algorithms for web3.

7/ Comparing NFTs to webpages is a false equivalency in many ways. But this shows how indexing and searching NFTs could be the next Google-scale big data problem.

If working on this is interesting to you, check out our job postings here: https://opensea.io/careers

NFTs will outnumber websites

1/ I’m very excited to officially announce OpenSea Ventures, our initiative to advance Web3 outside the bounds of the company: https://opensea.io/blog/announcements/openseas-ecosystem-investments/

Here's why investment in Web3 is important to us:

2/ Ever since we started OpenSea four years ago, it was clear that our vision would not be company-centric, or even NFT-centric.

Public blockchains are universal APIs that cross borders between companies and have very few (if any) dependencies on them.

3/ This is an incredible and novel concept, and one of the consequences is the most powerful ecosystem in human history.

Today, at OpenSea, we’re very privileged to sit in the middle of it.

4/ Many corporate venture arms “invest and forget”. A key goal of OpenSea Ventures is to provide value outside of just funding.

Benefits of working with us include...

5/
- Access to OpenSea leadership
- Assistance w/ NFT security + NFT standards 🔐
- Integration w/ http://docs.opensea.io
- Early access to undocumented OpenSea APIs 👀
- Guest blog posts on http://opensea.io/blog
- Connections to creators &amp; OpenSea Grant recipients 🎨

6/ Additionally, we’ll offer introductions to some of the most helpful investors and venture partners in the space, including
- firms like @a16z and @animocabrands,
- individuals like @3LAU, @zoink, &amp; @katie_haun,
- and other venture firms like @AlchemyPlatform.

8/ Additional partners who've been helpful not just to us but to many emergent NFT creators and developers:
@kevinhartz, @1confirmation &amp; @NTmoney, @JaredLeto, @standardcrypto, @alexisohanian, @ElectricCapital &amp; @avichal 

(Appreciative of all your ongoing support!)

7/ Read more about the benefits at https://opensea.io/opensea-ventures.

We look forward to hearing your ideas and helping out!

Announcing OpenSea Ventures

Pick a version of the future that's inevitable, and work on it

Excited to officially announce the NFT Security Group.

Web3 security is a community effort, so we’re partnering w/ more than 15 companies &amp; projects to share vulnerabilities and fixes before they reach other platforms. https://opensea.io/blog/safety-security/introducing-the-nft-security-group/

Web3 is, in many ways, *one single meta-platform*. More collaboration in this space is required to keep it secure.

The NFT Security Group will collaborate privately to focus on safety goals that are proactive (vs merely reactive), community-driven, and extend cross-platform.

We’ll tackle frontier security issues like
⛓ blockchain consensus security,
⚙️ smart contract security,
💵 wallet security,
🏞 metadata security, and
🌐 interoperability

Thanks so far to: @ArweaveTeam, @BlockadeGames, @Coinbase, @withFND, @0xHorizonGames, @IPFS, @KnownOrigin_io, @MakersPlaceco, @manifoldxyz, @Metamask, @NiftyGateway, @Polygon, @Rarible, @SuperRare, @WalletConnect for participating

It's invite only for now, but you can contribute to NFT security in a few ways:

1) participate in bug bounty programs in the space (check out lists on @immunefi, @Code4rena, @HackenProof and @Hacker0x01),
2) work w/ an auditing firm, and
3) join OpenSea - we’re hiring!

Announcing the NFT Security Group

Looking back at 2021: it was an incredible turning point for OpenSea, NFTs, and Web3 as a whole.

A few of my favorite moments… 1/8

2/ In January we took our NFT minter out of beta, and it became the first way to create NFTs for free. We saw exponential growth of created NFTs and their volume afterwards.

https://blog.opensea.io/announcements/introducing-the-collection-manager/

3/ In the spring we launched support for @0xPolygon and @klaytn_official - going multi-chain, eco friendly, and gas-free all at once.

We also launched OpenSea Drops, starting with our first mainstream content primary sale drop, @ShawnMendes x @Genies.

https://twitter.com/opensea/status/1364686389137321990

4/ We got to work with some of the brightest teams in Web3 to help expand our collective ecosystem, partnering with @IPFS and @Filecoin to let people freeze NFT metadata in a decentralized way.

https://opensea.io/blog/announcements/decentralizing-nft-metadata-on-opensea/

5/ We saw a huge need for creators to show authenticity for their work, so we partnered with @Adobe to integrate @ContentAuth into OpenSea natively.

https://opensea.io/blog/announcements/strengthening-digital-provenance-with-opensea-and-adobe/

6/ And, excitingly, we launched a mobile app.

You can now take your NFTs with you wherever you go, and browse the best new collections launching on all supported blockchains.

https://opensea.io/blog/announcements/introducing-the-opensea-mobile-app/

7/ But above all, we began to see Web3 truly take shape. Web3 is about transitioning ownership from companies to users.

The Web2 community is based on shared interests.

Web3 goes one step further and creates shared incentives.

8/ These shared incentives turn communities into teams.

It's the work of these hundreds of thousands of teams that collectively contribute to Web3's success.

And in 2022, I think we'll see a new evolutionary wave of them. The new Internet is still just on the horizon 🌅

Looking back at 2021

Announcing our Series B. We've grown the @opensea team to over thirty people now. Here's the background story (1/9): https://twitter.com/opensea/status/1417468800845455360

2/ In 2017, @dfinzer and I set out in search of the “killer app” for crypto. In an industry ripe with noise at the time, we began to wonder if the next paradigm shift - after the Internet and mobile - was indeed here, after all.

But NFTs presented a new hope, for several reasons

2/ First, they fulfilled an economic dream for the internet. An NFT is the ideal good: provable ownership, easy to transfer, and radically transparent.

NFTs de-risk digital ownership for end-users, and they de-risk community ownership for creators.

3/ A few extremely unique applications in different verticals almost immediately emerged:

🎨 one in digital art (@larvalabs' CryptoPunks)
🏔 one in virtual land (@Decentraland)
🙀 and one in gaming (@dapperlabs' @CryptoKitties)

4/ Many people dismissed these projects as mere toys. But new industries are often disguised as toys in the beginning. Apple started as just a hobbyist computer kit

These projects were also modest: they acquired users by word of mouth &amp; without the customary ICO marketing fluff

5/ This helped us see the other possibilities ahead: domain names, licenses, tickets, memberships, &amp; new ways of engaging fans

It's been a privilege to see many of these visions come to life: @ensdomains, @FontCommunity, @YellowHeartTix, @warriors NFTs, @BoredApeYC and many more

6/ Second, the early NFT projects were all radically transparent. You didn’t have to be in the community to participate. You just had to be watching the blockchain.

Radical transparency on an information superhighway like the Internet leads to dramatic economies of scale.

7/ In the early days, NFTs were limited by their purely digital nature, which was another reason that much of the world overlooked them.

But that helped keep the early OpenSea marketplace simple and nimble as we explored what NFTs really meant to the community.

8/ Finally, as engineers ourselves, we simply enjoyed building with NFTs.

Without enjoying them, we would not have lasted as long as we did, waiting for the world to discover them this year.

9/ What about the future? We think the internet is about to undergo a fundamental shift: from merely transferring information to also transferring value

NFTs will be the protocol for that new internet. And @opensea's job is help users discover it

So how can you be a part of it?

9.5/ Many of you already are. NFTs are a community effort. A huge thank you to all our users, creators, and partners - you are early adopters of a historical shift in technology, and you should be proud.

If you want to go deeper, you can join our team: https://opensea.io/careers ❤️

The OpenSea Story

The “it’s a technology in search of a problem” critique isn’t really applicable to revolutions like personal computers, the internet, and crypto

Today, they all solve many problems. But at the beginning, they didn’t

They just gave birth to previously unfathomable businesses 1/2

Apple had no idea that personal computers would give birth to spreadsheets or desktop publishing (PageMaker, the Mac’s first killer app, in 1985). But once they realized this, hey doubled down on marketing for it.

NFTs are doing this for crypto. They’re the killer app.

Previously unfathomable businesses

We're excited to have @a16z join us in our mission to empower digital creators and internet-native economies, along with @mcuban, @tferriss, @naval, @3lau, @standardcrypto, our existing investors, and many others!

Help us build the best-possible team: http://opensea.io/jobs https://twitter.com/a16z/status/1372567801446211592

And we're very grateful for the ongoing support from @NTmoney at @1Confirmation, @blockchaincap, @reganbozman, @kevinhartz, and @zoink! ❤️