BlocksInform
On January 18, OPENSEA announced the purchase of Dharma Labs for an undisclosed amount. The latest round of global DTV financing has recently been valued at $13.3 billion.
Sources at the 2017-founded firm told Reuters that deal would help it “dramatically improve the experience of buying, minting, and selling NFTs” on its platform.
Axios reported that the two companies were in talks at the start of the month, adding that:
"The terms of the deal are still being worked out, with the current discussion of an all-stock deal valued at between $110 million and $130 million."
Opensea to permit fiat?
The scan implies an offset at the top. Opensea stated that its cto, alex atallah, would have a new role in managing the company's web3 and nft ecosystem development. His post will be held by nadav hollander, general manager of Dharma Labs.
Hollander, who previously worked for Google and Coinbase, commented that OpenSea went up "almost 1,000x overnight" on the back of the massive explosion in NFT markets in 2021, before adding:
Now is the historic opportunity to create a truly generational product. I am pleased to focus on scaling OpenSea's technology to meet the standards of reliability, performance and availability that its users expect and deserve."
Dharma began as a challenge lending app that allowed users to deposit fiat in order to exchange tokens on Uniswap. The company is also closely linked to the worldwide leader decentralized exchange. It integrated with the DEX in 2020 and holds a massive bag of UNI tokens making it one of the major voting influences in Uniswap’s governance.
Dharma’s app will be retired according to the announcement and it is likely that something similar will be developed by OpenSea to enable users to buy and sell NFTs for fiat in addition to crypto.
NFT Ecosystem Outlook
OpenSea has seen record volumes so far this year and has already eclipsed August 2021, its previous highest month for trading. According to Dune Analytics, OpenSea has notched up $3.8 billion in sales on Ethereum so far this month. The market has recorded 1.4 million tons sold since the beginning of the year.
Its number of active traders has also hit a record high this month with 38,843 traders thus far. The highest month previously for this measure was December 2021, when there were 362,679 traders active on the platform, according to Dune.
