OpenSea Only Thinking of IPO That May Include NFT Community, CFO Says

Newly hired OpenSea CFO Brian Roberts has clarified that the company isn’t necessarily going public yet, but is looking at “what an IPO will look like,” a Crypto Economy report said Wednesday (Dec. 8).

The rumors of the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace going public had resulted in critiques that an initial public offering (IPO) could have adverse effects for the crypto market overall.

OpenSea is one of the larger NFT companies, and many users don’t want it to go public. In response, CFO Brian Roberts tweeted on Tuesday (Dec. 7) that the reporting had been “inaccurate” about the company’s plans.

“Let me set the record straight: there is a big gap between thinking about what an IPO might eventually look like [and] actively planning one,” he wrote. “We are not planning an IPO, and if we ever did, we would look to involve the community.”

The rumors were initially published on Tuesday (Dec. 7) as Roberts was hired. As Roberts was influential in the IPO for Lyft in 2019, users speculated that he might be brought on for OpenSea for a similar reason.

In some interviews, he had also hinted about the possibility of IPOs, with Roberts saying the company was growing fast and that going public was “very rational,” the report says.

Some of the critiques around the potential IPO are focused on the fact that if OpenSea did go public, the platform wouldn’t have a token. However, Roberts said the company might launch a token after all – nothing is set in stone.

PYMNTS writes that OpenSea saw less activity in September, with the sales volume early that month falling almost 50% from high numbers in August. The value hit $792 million from 156,811 traders, according to Cointelegraph data.

See also: NFT Marketplace OpenSea Sees Sales Volume Drop 50% in First Week of September

Despite the drop, OpenSea was still the biggest NFT site, with DappRadar data showing that it didn’t have any close competition in terms of active traders and the value of the trades.

According to that data, OpenSea had 398,638 traders in the late summer this year, doing $4.03 billion in trades.