OpenSea new CFO Brian Roberts hints IPO plans
The top NFT marketplace OpenSea is considering going public after hiring its new Chief Financial Officer Brian Roberts, who is the former CFO of ride-hailing service app Lyft.
Based in San Francisco, USA, and listed on NASDAQ, Lyft offers ride-hailing and other services such as offering vehicles for hire, rental cars, and food delivery. Roberts had a successful 7-year-streak as the company’s CFO before joining OpenSea.
In a Bloomberg interview, Roberts noted that while he loved working in Lyft, he wanted to work in web3 crypto startups, particularly in OpenSea’s marketplace for NFTs. Roberts is one of the many executives and engineers who have departed from long-established tech firms to work in the budding crypto industry.
“I haven’t been this excited about something in a very long time,” he said to Bloomberg. “It reminds me of 1995 eBay.”
Roberts is looking to help OpenSea the way it helped Lyft go public in 2019. Hinting at possible prompt IPO listing, the new CFO said the company will use the additional funds to endorse new deals, acquire more firms, and create new joint ventures to expand the NFT market.
OpenSea had its most successful run this year, becoming the first NFT platform with a monthly turnover of $1 billion. In November, it received investment offers from seven investment companies to raise at a $10 billion valuation.
“When you have a company growing as fast as this one, you’d be foolish not to think about it going public,” Roberts remarked. It “would be well-received in the public market given its growth.”
Meanwhile, some members of the crypto community are not happy with the news. With its IPO plans, OpenSea would likely discard its plans to issue a governance token, which many of the community members were hoping for. Many had been anticipating for OpenSea to adopt a decentralized model rather than a traditional centralized administration.
Sucks to hear @opensea is selling out and doing an IPO.
Their VCs didn’t get them to where they are today. We did.
Just another reason why I can’t wait for @Coinbase_NFT. If we are using corporate vehicles, we might as well use the one that won’t go down three times a week.
— 2070 (@Punk_2070) December 6, 2021
“Imagine being the largest and most successful NFT marketplace yet choosing to go for IPO instead of issuing token,” tweeted Arthur Cheong, founder of DeFiance Capital.
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OhNoCryptocurrency via https://www.ohnocrypto.com/ @Gauri Bhatia, @Khareem Sudlow