OpenSea Walks Back IPO After Backlash

OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace, hired a new Chief Financial Officer, Brian Roberts, earlier this month. Roberts comes from Lyft, where he was also the Chief Financial Officer. Apparently, one of Roberts’s responsibilities was to prepare to take the company public, which he mentioned in an interview with Bloomberg.  The company handles billions in transactions each month, and they take 2.5% from every trade.

Many in the crypto community are furious over the idea of OpenSea using a traditional IPO process. In the world of cryptocurrencies, users are accustomed to being rewarded for being early and active with a token airdrop. Airdrops are when companies mint their own token and give them out for free to the community members that have made them a success.  Some of the biggest projects, like MetaMask, OpenSea, and Ethereum Name Service, have been highly anticipated airdrops. Earlier this year when Ethereum Name Service did their airdrop, many users were rewarded with over tens of thousands in tokens for using the service.

Shortly after his comments, Roberts walked back talk of the IPO saying in a tweet: “Let me set the record straight: there is a big gap between thinking about what an IPO might eventually look like & actively planning one. We are not planning an IPO, and if we ever did, we would look to involve the community.”