26 ms·

Sources: OpenSea Eyes $13B Valuation

58 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

skilled 5y ago
OpenSea is creepy. I think there have been numerous cases where they have frozen accounts/addresses with substantial value inside of them. Sure, someone got hacked and they want to protect their assets, but I always thought that if you lost crypto, it was gone for good.
- topicseed 5y ago
  They can't freeze an address, can they? They can block an address for participating on OpenSea but that address can participate in and on other marketplaces? (Genuinely asking.)
  - CyrusL 5y ago
    That's correct
aspenmayer 5y ago
I just remembered that OpenSea is a YC company. How the plot thickens. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/opensea https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/opensea
ramesh31 5y ago
Sure, why not.
rafale 5y ago
They had be worth at least 5 times if they ICOed, and in the process reward their users. Sell outs.
- fredestine 5y ago
  do you want to deal with SEC after your ICO? im pretty sure they dont
  - rafale 5y ago
    They could have called it a "governance coin"
    - verdverm 5y ago
      That's not how ICOs, securities, and the SEC work.
- unemphysbro 5y ago
  yeah, though, it seems they want to go legit through the eyes of regulators. personally, I would've preferred an ICO. It's the new-world fundraising model that should be normalized.
  - moneywoes 5y ago
    What are the advantages of an ico? I vaguely recall the ico boom and bust in 2017. Any basics?
    - unemphysbro 5y ago
      freedom and access - anyone can tailor a unique or novel fundraising models in code. in theory it's pure democratization of financial instruments. i recommend anyone new to the space to play around with contracts on testnets. now anyone with basic coding know-how can play the types of financial games limited to the select few through credentialization, connections, or regulatory barriers. i think it's the coolest thing ever.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    ICOs absolutely ruin the concept of a venture-backed business. By providing liquidity on day 1, you release onto an uninformed populace a token with zero intrinsic value. At that point, your goal is not to build a business but rather to market your token - as that is where your compensation comes from. Your compensation isn't tied to any value you create in the business whatsoever - as it would be when trying to raise from VCs - but instead how much hype you can generate. Now that your blue-sky security (your token) is your product, any money you spend trying to build a business puts you at a disadvantage relative to competitors who do not. Growth isn't even reflected in the token itself since tokens are not equity. It's not even an advantage to token holders for token issuers to try and build a business haha. That's why in the last 14 years not a single ICO or token-first business has been successful in creating a business. It is counterproductive to an ICO to actually try and build something under it, for everyone invovled.
    - boppo1 5y ago
- raverbashing 5y ago
  As opposed to their fans and users, they know what kind of actual store of value is more interesting to hold. (theoretical) billions of dollars in some memecoin might look good on paper but most people and services that care require payment in dollars
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
A decently funded competitor could strip their userbase pretty quickly. There's not a lot of user loyalty in this particular market segment at this particular time, and OpenSea hasn't made much effort to increase it. That said, just because it could happen doesn't mean it will.
- steelstraw 5y ago
  Coinbase will eat their lunch. https://www.coinbase.com/nft/announce https://www.coinbase.com/nft/announce
  - qeternity 5y ago
    Every other exchange which already has dumb retail money and fiat on ramps will eat their lunch. FTX, Coinbase, etc
BoysenberryPi 5y ago
OpenSea is a great example of break the law until you get caught and then pay a small fine. They just haven't reached the "get caught" part yet. Putting utter ridiculousness of NFTs aside, a lot of the art on the site is straight up stolen and artist have very little recourse in what they can do. Here is a good Twitter thread from Loish summarizing the state of affairs for artist https://nitter.net/loishh/status/1470340143970230277 https://nitter.net/loishh/status/1470340143970230277
- politician 5y ago
  Art can't be stolen by NFTs because NFTs don't contain content, only links to content. When you buy an NFT, you're buying some metadata containing a URL of some art -- a pointer. Artists that are upset about hyperlinks to copyrighted images should go after the hosting servers with DMCA claims or the equivalent. Consider: Is an NFT that points to another NFT stolen?
  - verdverm 5y ago
    Consider, is OpenSea displaying copyrighted images, what is their legal liability?
    - politician 5y ago
      Forget OpenSea. If Wikipedia willfully displays unlicensed images taken from Getty Images, Getty Images could get them taken down using existing legal tools.
      - verdverm 5y ago
        Also consider copyright holders are free to choose who they enforce their rights against. Same applies to licenses.
  - noodle 5y ago
    Isn't the NFT selling the premise that the owner of the NFT owns the art being pointed to? Maybe it isn't theft but it does seem to be fraud? Or if the argument is that NFTs don't convey some sort of ownership over the thing it points to, what's even the point of NFTs?
paxys 5y ago
Selling shovels during a gold rush is always a great business. Coinbase is worth $50B+, so I don't see why this is too surprising.
- IAmEveryone 5y ago
  It's a surprise because they aren't mining gold. They are mining CO2, with cute little certificates you can leave behind to prove to your grandchildren that Gramps was part of the problem.
  - bambax 5y ago
    Yes, but they don't care because there won't be any grand children to look them in the eyes and question their actions. They are all nihilists who are heating themselves with wood torn from the sinking ship.
- MichaelBurge 5y ago
  There is no gold rush. Nobody's actually buying these apes. They're wash trades among insiders/friends for tax evasion/money laundering purposes. Maybe a dumbass occasionally bites, but they're not the bulk. The market cap, volume, Github activity, PR/news are all lies; manipulated statistics because people look at them to judge credibility. It wouldn't surprise me if the "$2.2 million theft" was friends of the owners stealing them so they could take a tax writeoff. Stolen 6 days ago, 2 days before the year ends.
  - thepasswordis 5y ago
    Beeple is about $100M richer now than he was a year ago. That's not fake.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      Beeple has been involved with projects which then turned around and bought his pieces. He’s the epitome of the problem.
spoonjim 5y ago
You mean their management wants to be paid in FIAT? gasp LOLOL
- aorth 5y ago
  Yeah, can't they get paid in silly cartoon drawings? I'm laughing at the leading graphic in the article showing a screenshot from OpenSea that says you can buy "extraordinary" NFTs. What the hell is so extraordinary about hundreds of slightly different low-quality caricatures of monkeys? This one has a hat. This one is wearing his hat backwards. This one is chewing bubble gum. I don't understand why anyone thinks this is special.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    Why do people pay lots money for a regular shirt that has a particular logo on it? I don’t know either but I know that if you can make it happen you get rich.
    - Tiktaalik 5y ago
      Those shirts are dumb, but at least there's an explanation: They're typically associated with premium brands that have a long, rich history in the fashion industry (usually by making lots of products that are quite a bit more challenging than the t-shirt). There is no such history with random monkey NFT pictures.
      - spoonjim 5y ago
        The value of the long rich history is just in how much people respect it. There are 20 year old brands more prestigious than hundred year old brands... no reason a one-year-old brand can't be worth more still. And I don't see why making a swan costume for Bjork or a meat dress for Lady Gaga means your T-shirt is worth more.
- Jxl180 5y ago
  I don’t get how this is a “gotcha.” That’s like being shocked that people at Black Rock want to be paid in USD and not mutual funds, or employees at Exxon want to be paid in fiat instead of barrels of crude oil. Food, credit card bills, land lords, and utility services demand to be paid in USD regardless of the value of whatever commodity an employer trades.
noyeastguy 5y ago
It seems like there is some new undetected "lead in the pipes" thing going on these days where everyone is going crazy. Sociopathy is running amok. Our institutions used to be able to control these people. We need new ways of identifying bad actors and marking them to the rest of society. Maybe with Elizabeth Holmes getting found guilty the trend can start reversing. Hey you know what? Maybe we could create a trust-less distributed database to keep track of conmen, like a Equifax for bad actors on the blockchain ;).
moneywoes 5y ago
Say I mint an NFT and then purchase it myself for a high price. The next transaction will be Likely ahead of that price correct? Besides gas fees, what’s stopping by people from pumping their own NFTs?
- xur17 5y ago
  I believe opensea also takes a 2.5% cut, which would make this relatively costly.
  - guynamedloren 5y ago
    As long as they eventually find the greater fool, the 2.5% cut is just the cost of doing (pumping) business.
  - danielvf 5y ago
    A friend of mine in the NFT business says that OpenSea's relatively high fee is one of the things that makes the site work, by putting a real cost onto wash trading at scale.
  - bagels 5y ago
    If you mint a series of, say one hundred monkey pictures, and you buy one from yourself for $10k, you now have $1m in monkey pictures. The 2.5 points on a 10k transaction to create $1m is worth it.
    - xur17 5y ago
      You only have $1M if you can convince someone else to buy the rest at the "market price". Otherwise you have -$10k.
      - bagels 5y ago
        This is true, except you have only lost the $250 in fees. Some people are able to, some people are not.
alexjray 5y ago
Open sea sucks, crashes all the time
- MildlySerious 5y ago
  That didn't stop Snapchat from hitting a ~20B valuation.
keewee7 5y ago
My FOMO about Crypto is getting real. What is the equivalent of an index fund for all the crypto hype? Something I can invest in and only have to check once a month.
- realslimjd 5y ago
  There's a Bitcoin ETF now. That should serve as a good proxy for crypto hype.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    There is no US listed Bitcoin ETF. The Greyscale trusts are closed-end funds that are trading at a massive discount to NAV. -21.25% today for GBTC. [1] The BITO ETF doesn't hold Bitcoin but instead holds CME futures contracts. Scroll down to Holdings. [2] I would strongly encourage folks who do not know the difference between holding the underlying asset and holding futures contracts to avoid aping into this. [1] https://ycharts.com/companies/GBTC/discount_or_premium_to_nav https://ycharts.com/companies/GBTC/discount_or_premium_to_na... [2] https://www.proshares.com/our-etfs/strategic/bito https://www.proshares.com/our-etfs/strategic/bito
- vecio 5y ago
  BOX is something similar https://b.watch https://b.watch BOX is an open source formula for digital assets. It includes 7 targets, which are BTC, ETH, EOS, DOT, MOB, XIN, UNI.
- jazzkingrt 5y ago
  Recently learned about Bitwise funds. They seem reasonable on the surface but I haven't done much research.
- chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
  Most smart contract platforms build on Ethereum. Just buying ETH is a pretty safe bet, if you believe in crypto
danielvf 5y ago
Most modern crypto projects are paying massively for users and attention - like UBER in the early days. But OpenSea is just pure cash cow - eighty million a month in revenue, off minimal expenses and no advertising. Regardless of whatever succeeds in the NFT ecosystem, they benenfit. Lots of other projects have played me-too, or tried to surf the waves and trends in crypto. OpenSea has just been doing their own simple narrow vision thing, regardless of markets going up or down, or NFT's falling completely off the radar for a long time. The site is simple, easy to understand, and has mind boggling network effects. They probably have the most enviable position right now in crypto-space, right next to Coinbase. Good to be them, and here's to them not screwing it up in the future by throwing money to fix things that aren't broken.
brightball 5y ago
It's hilarious to me that a "make your own pet rock" business gets this much attention.
- dang 5y ago
  "Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Perhaps you don't feel you owe businesses that you feel are pet rock businesses better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. We're trying for a culture of curious conversation here.
  - brightball 5y ago
    That’s fair. I apologize. This particular business and the overall NFT market comes across as snake oil to me (and a lot of other people). I question the ethics of it. Perhaps a snarky comment wasn’t the appropriate way to express that. Kudos to their team for capitalizing on it though.
einpoklum 5y ago
A website for auctioning specific nothings to people who want to waste money valued at 13 Billion USD. ... Well, I guess that's it then. .. Repent! The end is nigh! http://29odkrngwwiml6xqsb8nbfh.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Lead64.jpg http://29odkrngwwiml6xqsb8nbfh.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-co...
aspenmayer 5y ago
I hope they make it impossible for OpenSea staff to insider trade and wash trade. Well, I would hope that, but it seems that there’s no meaningful way for OpenSea to actually enforce such a ban. And this isn’t a hypothetical flaw in OpenSea. It is known that at least one employee (OpenSea’s former head of product, Nate Chastain) has done insider trading on OpenSea an unknown number of times, likely profiting 18.875 ether or more, which is over $50k. Not exactly small potatoes here. Worse is that he was front-running front page content before it went live on the homepage. We desperately need the decentralized exchange (DEX) equivalent to the centralized exchange that is OpenSea. I could swear I heard about a DEX for NFTs, maybe someone in the comments has some links. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/15/opensea-insider-trading-rumors-are-true.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/15/opensea-insider-trading-rumo...
downWidOutaFite 5y ago
Lol so decentralized! /s

58 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

OpenSea is creepy. I think there have been numerous cases where they have frozen accounts/addresses with substantial value inside of them. Sure, someone got hacked and they want to protect their assets, but I always thought that if you lost crypto, it was gone for good.

topicseed 5y ago
They can't freeze an address, can they? They can block an address for participating on OpenSea but that address can participate in and on other marketplaces? (Genuinely asking.)
- CyrusL 5y ago
  That's correct

aspenmayer 5y ago

I just remembered that OpenSea is a YC company. How the plot thickens. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/opensea https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/opensea

ramesh31 5y ago

Sure, why not.

rafale 5y ago

They had be worth at least 5 times if they ICOed, and in the process reward their users. Sell outs.

fredestine 5y ago
do you want to deal with SEC after your ICO? im pretty sure they dont
- rafale 5y ago
  They could have called it a "governance coin"
  - verdverm 5y ago
    That's not how ICOs, securities, and the SEC work.
unemphysbro 5y ago
yeah, though, it seems they want to go legit through the eyes of regulators. personally, I would've preferred an ICO. It's the new-world fundraising model that should be normalized.
- moneywoes 5y ago
  What are the advantages of an ico? I vaguely recall the ico boom and bust in 2017. Any basics?
  - unemphysbro 5y ago
    freedom and access - anyone can tailor a unique or novel fundraising models in code. in theory it's pure democratization of financial instruments. i recommend anyone new to the space to play around with contracts on testnets. now anyone with basic coding know-how can play the types of financial games limited to the select few through credentialization, connections, or regulatory barriers. i think it's the coolest thing ever.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  ICOs absolutely ruin the concept of a venture-backed business. By providing liquidity on day 1, you release onto an uninformed populace a token with zero intrinsic value. At that point, your goal is not to build a business but rather to market your token - as that is where your compensation comes from. Your compensation isn't tied to any value you create in the business whatsoever - as it would be when trying to raise from VCs - but instead how much hype you can generate. Now that your blue-sky security (your token) is your product, any money you spend trying to build a business puts you at a disadvantage relative to competitors who do not. Growth isn't even reflected in the token itself since tokens are not equity. It's not even an advantage to token holders for token issuers to try and build a business haha. That's why in the last 14 years not a single ICO or token-first business has been successful in creating a business. It is counterproductive to an ICO to actually try and build something under it, for everyone invovled.
  - boppo1 5y ago
raverbashing 5y ago
As opposed to their fans and users, they know what kind of actual store of value is more interesting to hold. (theoretical) billions of dollars in some memecoin might look good on paper but most people and services that care require payment in dollars

TigeriusKirk 5y ago

A decently funded competitor could strip their userbase pretty quickly. There's not a lot of user loyalty in this particular market segment at this particular time, and OpenSea hasn't made much effort to increase it. That said, just because it could happen doesn't mean it will.

steelstraw 5y ago
Coinbase will eat their lunch. https://www.coinbase.com/nft/announce https://www.coinbase.com/nft/announce
- qeternity 5y ago
  Every other exchange which already has dumb retail money and fiat on ramps will eat their lunch. FTX, Coinbase, etc

BoysenberryPi 5y ago

OpenSea is a great example of break the law until you get caught and then pay a small fine. They just haven't reached the "get caught" part yet. Putting utter ridiculousness of NFTs aside, a lot of the art on the site is straight up stolen and artist have very little recourse in what they can do. Here is a good Twitter thread from Loish summarizing the state of affairs for artist https://nitter.net/loishh/status/1470340143970230277 https://nitter.net/loishh/status/1470340143970230277

politician 5y ago
Art can't be stolen by NFTs because NFTs don't contain content, only links to content. When you buy an NFT, you're buying some metadata containing a URL of some art -- a pointer. Artists that are upset about hyperlinks to copyrighted images should go after the hosting servers with DMCA claims or the equivalent. Consider: Is an NFT that points to another NFT stolen?
- verdverm 5y ago
  Consider, is OpenSea displaying copyrighted images, what is their legal liability?
  - politician 5y ago
    Forget OpenSea. If Wikipedia willfully displays unlicensed images taken from Getty Images, Getty Images could get them taken down using existing legal tools.
    - verdverm 5y ago
      Also consider copyright holders are free to choose who they enforce their rights against. Same applies to licenses.
- noodle 5y ago
  Isn't the NFT selling the premise that the owner of the NFT owns the art being pointed to? Maybe it isn't theft but it does seem to be fraud? Or if the argument is that NFTs don't convey some sort of ownership over the thing it points to, what's even the point of NFTs?

paxys 5y ago

Selling shovels during a gold rush is always a great business. Coinbase is worth $50B+, so I don't see why this is too surprising.

IAmEveryone 5y ago
It's a surprise because they aren't mining gold. They are mining CO2, with cute little certificates you can leave behind to prove to your grandchildren that Gramps was part of the problem.
- bambax 5y ago
  Yes, but they don't care because there won't be any grand children to look them in the eyes and question their actions. They are all nihilists who are heating themselves with wood torn from the sinking ship.
MichaelBurge 5y ago
There is no gold rush. Nobody's actually buying these apes. They're wash trades among insiders/friends for tax evasion/money laundering purposes. Maybe a dumbass occasionally bites, but they're not the bulk. The market cap, volume, Github activity, PR/news are all lies; manipulated statistics because people look at them to judge credibility. It wouldn't surprise me if the "$2.2 million theft" was friends of the owners stealing them so they could take a tax writeoff. Stolen 6 days ago, 2 days before the year ends.
- thepasswordis 5y ago
  Beeple is about $100M richer now than he was a year ago. That's not fake.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    Beeple has been involved with projects which then turned around and bought his pieces. He’s the epitome of the problem.

spoonjim 5y ago

You mean their management wants to be paid in FIAT? gasp LOLOL

aorth 5y ago
Yeah, can't they get paid in silly cartoon drawings? I'm laughing at the leading graphic in the article showing a screenshot from OpenSea that says you can buy "extraordinary" NFTs. What the hell is so extraordinary about hundreds of slightly different low-quality caricatures of monkeys? This one has a hat. This one is wearing his hat backwards. This one is chewing bubble gum. I don't understand why anyone thinks this is special.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Why do people pay lots money for a regular shirt that has a particular logo on it? I don’t know either but I know that if you can make it happen you get rich.
  - Tiktaalik 5y ago
    Those shirts are dumb, but at least there's an explanation: They're typically associated with premium brands that have a long, rich history in the fashion industry (usually by making lots of products that are quite a bit more challenging than the t-shirt). There is no such history with random monkey NFT pictures.
    - spoonjim 5y ago
      The value of the long rich history is just in how much people respect it. There are 20 year old brands more prestigious than hundred year old brands... no reason a one-year-old brand can't be worth more still. And I don't see why making a swan costume for Bjork or a meat dress for Lady Gaga means your T-shirt is worth more.
Jxl180 5y ago
I don’t get how this is a “gotcha.” That’s like being shocked that people at Black Rock want to be paid in USD and not mutual funds, or employees at Exxon want to be paid in fiat instead of barrels of crude oil. Food, credit card bills, land lords, and utility services demand to be paid in USD regardless of the value of whatever commodity an employer trades.

noyeastguy 5y ago

It seems like there is some new undetected "lead in the pipes" thing going on these days where everyone is going crazy. Sociopathy is running amok. Our institutions used to be able to control these people. We need new ways of identifying bad actors and marking them to the rest of society. Maybe with Elizabeth Holmes getting found guilty the trend can start reversing. Hey you know what? Maybe we could create a trust-less distributed database to keep track of conmen, like a Equifax for bad actors on the blockchain ;).

moneywoes 5y ago

Say I mint an NFT and then purchase it myself for a high price. The next transaction will be Likely ahead of that price correct? Besides gas fees, what’s stopping by people from pumping their own NFTs?

xur17 5y ago
I believe opensea also takes a 2.5% cut, which would make this relatively costly.
- guynamedloren 5y ago
  As long as they eventually find the greater fool, the 2.5% cut is just the cost of doing (pumping) business.
- danielvf 5y ago
  A friend of mine in the NFT business says that OpenSea's relatively high fee is one of the things that makes the site work, by putting a real cost onto wash trading at scale.
- bagels 5y ago
  If you mint a series of, say one hundred monkey pictures, and you buy one from yourself for $10k, you now have $1m in monkey pictures. The 2.5 points on a 10k transaction to create $1m is worth it.
  - xur17 5y ago
    You only have $1M if you can convince someone else to buy the rest at the "market price". Otherwise you have -$10k.
    - bagels 5y ago
      This is true, except you have only lost the $250 in fees. Some people are able to, some people are not.

alexjray 5y ago

Open sea sucks, crashes all the time

MildlySerious 5y ago
That didn't stop Snapchat from hitting a ~20B valuation.

keewee7 5y ago

My FOMO about Crypto is getting real. What is the equivalent of an index fund for all the crypto hype? Something I can invest in and only have to check once a month.

realslimjd 5y ago
There's a Bitcoin ETF now. That should serve as a good proxy for crypto hype.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  There is no US listed Bitcoin ETF. The Greyscale trusts are closed-end funds that are trading at a massive discount to NAV. -21.25% today for GBTC. [1] The BITO ETF doesn't hold Bitcoin but instead holds CME futures contracts. Scroll down to Holdings. [2] I would strongly encourage folks who do not know the difference between holding the underlying asset and holding futures contracts to avoid aping into this. [1] https://ycharts.com/companies/GBTC/discount_or_premium_to_nav https://ycharts.com/companies/GBTC/discount_or_premium_to_na... [2] https://www.proshares.com/our-etfs/strategic/bito https://www.proshares.com/our-etfs/strategic/bito
vecio 5y ago
BOX is something similar https://b.watch https://b.watch BOX is an open source formula for digital assets. It includes 7 targets, which are BTC, ETH, EOS, DOT, MOB, XIN, UNI.
jazzkingrt 5y ago
Recently learned about Bitwise funds. They seem reasonable on the surface but I haven't done much research.
chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
Most smart contract platforms build on Ethereum. Just buying ETH is a pretty safe bet, if you believe in crypto

danielvf 5y ago

Most modern crypto projects are paying massively for users and attention - like UBER in the early days. But OpenSea is just pure cash cow - eighty million a month in revenue, off minimal expenses and no advertising. Regardless of whatever succeeds in the NFT ecosystem, they benenfit. Lots of other projects have played me-too, or tried to surf the waves and trends in crypto. OpenSea has just been doing their own simple narrow vision thing, regardless of markets going up or down, or NFT's falling completely off the radar for a long time. The site is simple, easy to understand, and has mind boggling network effects. They probably have the most enviable position right now in crypto-space, right next to Coinbase. Good to be them, and here's to them not screwing it up in the future by throwing money to fix things that aren't broken.

brightball 5y ago

It's hilarious to me that a "make your own pet rock" business gets this much attention.

dang 5y ago
"Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Perhaps you don't feel you owe businesses that you feel are pet rock businesses better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. We're trying for a culture of curious conversation here.
- brightball 5y ago
  That’s fair. I apologize. This particular business and the overall NFT market comes across as snake oil to me (and a lot of other people). I question the ethics of it. Perhaps a snarky comment wasn’t the appropriate way to express that. Kudos to their team for capitalizing on it though.

einpoklum 5y ago

A website for auctioning specific nothings to people who want to waste money valued at 13 Billion USD. ... Well, I guess that's it then. .. Repent! The end is nigh! http://29odkrngwwiml6xqsb8nbfh.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Lead64.jpg http://29odkrngwwiml6xqsb8nbfh.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-co...

aspenmayer 5y ago

I hope they make it impossible for OpenSea staff to insider trade and wash trade. Well, I would hope that, but it seems that there’s no meaningful way for OpenSea to actually enforce such a ban. And this isn’t a hypothetical flaw in OpenSea. It is known that at least one employee (OpenSea’s former head of product, Nate Chastain) has done insider trading on OpenSea an unknown number of times, likely profiting 18.875 ether or more, which is over $50k. Not exactly small potatoes here. Worse is that he was front-running front page content before it went live on the homepage. We desperately need the decentralized exchange (DEX) equivalent to the centralized exchange that is OpenSea. I could swear I heard about a DEX for NFTs, maybe someone in the comments has some links. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/15/opensea-insider-trading-rumors-are-true.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/15/opensea-insider-trading-rumo...

downWidOutaFite 5y ago

Lol so decentralized! /s