The crash of the NFT market led OpenSea to fire more than half of its staff. But the startup has reinvented itself into a place for buying and selling all tokens, including memecoins, and trading volume is surging once again.
Ascrypto receives a warm embrace in Washington and token prices rise to new levels, some once-hot digital asset sectors like NFTs continue to languish. Few firms have suffered the brunt of NFTs’ collapse more than NFT specialist OpenSea.
Starting in mid-2022, the market for digital art represented by these unique, nonfungible tokens–from CryptoPunks to Bored Apes—experienced a spectacular fall, declining by more than 80%. By October 2023, OpenSea, the once-dominant venue for buying and selling NFTs, was bringing in just $3 million in monthly revenue, down from a peak of $125 million in January 2022, the same month the startup was valued at $13.3 billion, briefly giving its cofounders ownership stakes worth more than $2 billion.
It wasn’t just that people had lost interest in NFTs. OpenSea had also been abruptly overtaken by an upstart competitor, Blur, which charged zero trading fees and didn’t require buyers to pay royalties to NFT creators. When OpenSea responded by loosening its own royalty policy, it drew the ire of its customers on Twitter, who said everything from “you people are foul” to characterizing it as “evil” and “a joke of a company.”
As OpenSea was hemorrhaging cash and struggling for market share, cofounder and CEO Devin Finzer held a company meeting for 175 staffers on payroll. He told employees that the company needed a reset and that he would be firing more than half of them. His goal: to emerge again as a smaller, nimbler startup where every remaining employee was enthusiastic about reinventing the company. Finzer offered severance packages to anyone who hadn’t been laid off but also wanted out.
“What was really tough was that a lot more people than I expected–some really good people–took that package,” he says today, looking downward, voice groggy, likely from his seven-day-a-week work schedule. CEO Finzer now operates often from a WeWork-like co-working space in downtown Manhattan. About six other New York area employees are office regulars, but nearly all of OpenSea’s 60 employees and 10 contractors today work remotely.
After trudging through a three-year bear market for digital art NFTs that may never bounce back, OpenSea is pivoting hard. Taking advantage of its customer base, which had swelled to millions of monthly website visitors, the battle-worn startup has expanded from NFTs to become a one-stop shop for trading all cryptocurrencies across 22 different blockchains. This shift means OpenSea can cash in on the memecoin craze, too.
Finzer, 34, credits his wife Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo with having the idea to turn OpenSea into a trade-any-crypto application. Kuo is an early cryptocurrency investor who pursued a PhD in philosophy and politics at Princeton, earned a Harvard Law degree and in 2016 began running a crypto trading fund. In 2021, Kuo left the trading fund and met Finzer later that year. “I really consider her a silent cofounder of OpenSea 2.0,” says Finzer. He adds that she spent hundreds of hours working with him on everything from OpenSea’s high-level strategy to technically mapping out how it would pull in trades from different blockchains.
OpenSea’s new focus is already showing real traction. In the first two weeks of October 2025, it facilitated $1.6 billion in cryptocurrency trades and $230 million in NFT transactions, up from $142 million in total volume in all of May. The surge will make October 2025 its biggest month in over three years. Under OpenSea’s new gameplan, it aggregates buy and sell orders from decentralized crypto exchanges like Uniswap and Meteora. In terms of fees, OpenSea takes about 0.9% for every transaction, accounting for $16 million in revenue over the last two weeks.
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Finzer’s new focus for OpenSea employs an age-old trader axiom, “Don’t fight the tape.” As the soaring price of bitcoin makes headlines, crypto goes mainstream and prediction markets gain in popularity, “risk on” is the new mantra for investors. One only needs to look at Robinhood’s 400% one-year stock return and exploding volume at prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket as evidence. Even though slumping market values for NFTs like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, whose average floor price has fallen from around $400,000 at its peak to $32,000 today, have burned many investors, a new crop of speculators remains undeterred. For the past two years, memecoins have been the industry’s biggest obsession. “You can’t fight the macro trend,” Finzer says, so you might as well embrace it.
Finzer thinks letting people trade any and all cryptocurrencies is the “right one for crypto right now” due to high demand. In this respect, he has taken a lesson from his biggest rival Blur, a company that burst onto the NFT scene three years ago with a trader-centric approach that helped it gobble up most of the NFT trading market.
His run-in with Blur also taught him something about leadership. After Blur made trading fee-free and royalty-free, Finzer responded with a series of flip-flopping fee changes that wavered between minimizing and maximizing royalties for digital creators. He was trying to please too many people, and his reactive, consensus-driven approach wasn’t working. Finzer learned to stop giving in to pressure from others and trust his own instincts. “For some of these things, the only way you get better is by having the thing happen and failing your way through it,” Finzer says.
Looking back on the past two years, Finzer and former OpenSea chief technology officer Nadav Hollander say the deep layoffs were essential. They flattened the startup’s structure and removed all technical managers so that every engineer wrote code. Finzer has also come to reject the conventional Silicon Valley wisdom of hiring rapidly to keep pace with soaring customer demand. He now tries to keep the company as small as possible, an approach that has become in vogue in the AI era.
Meanwhile, Blur seems to be missing in action. Its trading volume has dwindled to $92 million over the past month, down from more than $1 billion in early 2023, according to DappRadar. Its corporate X account and that of cofounder and CEO Tieshun Roquerre have been mysteriously quiet since last spring. Roquerre didn’t respond to Forbes’ emails or Telegram messages requesting an interview. “In crypto, some people are there to get in and get out,” says Finzer.
Crypto trading applications are everywhere–thousands already exist. Yet even though today’s most popular blockchains have been around for over a decade, no company has cracked the code on making it easy to trade the millions of tokens that reside on different blockchains and store the assets yourself (or in crypto parlance, self-custody).
While Coinbase makes 300 tokens available to trade through its centralized exchange primary service, that selection represents a tiny fraction of all the tokens in existence. And like a traditional bank, Coinbase stores customers’ assets for them. Everyday Americans typically don’t think twice about that since they’re accustomed to using banks, but it’s deeply troubling to cryptocurrency die-hards who believe in completely owning and controlling their crypto at all times. Just ask anyone who had money on crypto exchange FTX when it collapsed. (More recently, Coinbase has started making many more tokens available to trade through its Base service, which lets people self-custody their assets and trade on decentralized exchanges.)
Finzer says OpenSea’s bridging feature of letting people trade across 22 blockchains is its most attractive, since there are still few places where that’s easy to do. The challenges of achieving this are manifold–to do it well, a company needs to: index an ever-expanding list of tokens across an ever-expanding set of blockchain operating systems; get customers the best possible price for any given trade; make the application easy to use; create a user interface where people can discover new assets; prevent customers from getting scammed.
OpenSea built a booming business years ago by making NFTs simple for anyone to purchase, and it’s trying to do the same with all token trading. Finzer’s goal is to make the user’s experience as intuitive as it is on an app like Coinbase or Robinhood, while under the hood, aggregating people’s buy and sell orders from the places where more sophisticated, tech-savvy crypto traders congregate like Uniswap.
One way he tries to do this is by opting not to do know-your-customer (KYC) checks to verify a user’s identity. These checks are an important step required for banks and financial institutions to prevent money laundering and transfers from people in sanctioned countries. Finzer says OpenSea, which has moved its corporate headquarters to Miami, isn’t legally required to do KYC checks, since it’s not considered a U.S. money transmitter and never takes custody of customers’ assets. He adds that OpenSea uses blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs to check digital wallets against lists of sanctioned addresses and flag any suspicious transactions for money laundering.
But this compliance-light approach could easily present future risks, not only of money launderers and sanctioned-country senders slipping through the cracks, but also of future U.S. administrations bringing regulatory enforcement actions against OpenSea. Under President Biden, the Securities and Exchange Commission opened investigations into whether OpenSea and decentralized exchange Uniswap were running unlicensed securities exchanges. Both companies denied that they were violating the law, and the Trump Administration dropped those investigations this past February.
Finzer denies that OpenSea takes a compliance-light approach and says his company does more on compliance than “the vast majority of apps that are built on top of blockchains.” Regarding KYC checks, he says, “KYC isn’t an ‘option’ we’re choosing to avoid; it’s fundamentally incompatible with non-custodial architecture.”
OpenSea’s new trade-everything strategy also means Finzer is trying to straddle the distant worlds of art and pure financial speculation, a balance that seems impossible. He says he doesn’t want to build a “soulless financial app,” but when you visit the “Tokens” section of the site, it feels like a gambling-centric financial app.
The CEO thinks the art-focused NFT market, memecoins and all other crypto tokens can “harmoniously live together” in one place on OpenSea. He says the company is only “a fraction of the way” to its vision of a venue for trading all tokens and notes that it hasn’t even launched a new mobile app yet. An independent foundation set up by OpenSea is expected to release an OpenSea token soon, though Finzer declined to give details.
Outside of potential regulatory issues, OpenSea may face significant competitive challenges since the barriers to entry in crypto trading are low. In fact, globally there are hundreds of crypto exchanges. “We’ve found there’s a lot of moat in just consistently delivering on a quality product experience–building out a brand that’s trusted and works as users want it to work,” says Finzer. The history of crypto, and the eight-year history of his own startup, tells a different story.
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