OpenSea wants to go public despite crypto community outcry

OpenSea could be the next crypto-related company to go public after its new CFO, Brian Roberts, revealed in a recent interview that the firm was looking to raise funds through an Initial Public Offering (IPO).

OpenSea is going public

During the interview, Roberts, the former Lyft CFO, revealed that going public was an option for a firm growing at the pace of OpenSea. According to him, “When you have a company growing as fast as this one, you’d be foolish not to think about it going public. I’ve seen a lot of P&Ls (profit and loss statements) but I’ve never seen a P&L like this.”

Continuing on why OpenSea would consider going public, Roberts was of the opinion that the company does not literally need “to raise more cash,” instead, the leading NFT site would be using the new funding to “acquire companies, strike partnerships, and create joint ventures to further expand the use of NFTs into new industries.”

With this new revelation from OpenSea, the crypto community’s earlier speculation that the NFT marketplace could be launching its own native token or towing the path of Ethereum Name Service (ENS) in efforts to decentralize the company appears to be invalidated.

Interestingly, Brian Roberts played a major role in Lyft successful 2019 IPO.

The crypto community reacts negatively

Members of the crypto community have reacted negatively to news of OpenSea going public as many of them see it as a sign of betrayal from the crypto company.

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

One Twitter user, Ace LivingPixelated.eth, stated that he expected the company to give back to the community because it was able to succeed through the backing of the crypto community. Another user, basedkarbon noted that “OpenSea doesn’t care about community at all.”

With this news garnering this level of outrage from the crypto community, it means OpenSea could lose the support of the community who has brought it this far thereby giving room to competitors like FTX and Coinbase who are also introducing their own NFT marketplace.

OpenSea is undoubtedly one of the biggest winners of 2021 as the NFT marketplace has recorded over $10 billion worth of sales in this year alone.

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