Some news: I’ll be stepping away from OpenSea next month, but remain on the board.
With a team in place that I trust & 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:
My experience with Waking Up
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/
NFTs will outnumber websites
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 & 400m users online
• In 2010, there were ~200 million websites & ~2b users bit.ly/375IbM8
• Today, there are nearly 250 million searchable NFTs on OpenSea, & just a sliver of the internet's users
Announcing OpenSea Ventures
1/ I’m very excited to officially announce OpenSea Ventures, our initiative to advance Web3 outside the bounds of the company: 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.
Pick a version of the future that's inevitable, and work on it
Announcing the NFT Security Group
Excited to officially announce the NFT Security Group.
Web3 security is a community effort, so we’re partnering w/ more than 15 companies & projects to share vulnerabilities and fixes before they reach other platforms.
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.
Looking back at 2021
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.
The OpenSea Story
Announcing our Series B. We've grown the @opensea team to over thirty people now. Here's the background story (1/9): 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
OpenSea Series A
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: opensea.io/jobs twitter.com/a16z/status/1372567801446211592