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Devin Finzer, CEO of OpenSea
Finzer, Devin

Devin Finzer is the founder and CEO of OpenSea, which was one of the earliest non-fungible token (NFT) exchanges. His past experience includes Google and Pinterest, and he is a seasoned entrepreneur and software engineer. In 2017, he also sold Credit Karma his former company, Claimdog, which was a search engine for unclaimed money. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science from Brown University in 2013.
We talk about the evolution of NFTs and their market structure, the unique difficulties that blockchains answer for content creators, token economics for NFT platforms, and our predictions for the rest of the year in this interview. He also explains why all of this progress has paved the way for widespread NFT adoption.
Forbes CryptoAsset and Blockchain Advisor published this interview first. Here’s where you may sign up.
Forbes: To begin, what do you think the elevator pitch for non-fungible tokens is?
NFTs are digital entities that can live on the internet without being attached to a certain application, according to Devin Finzer. You may think of them as a very primitive form of owning anything online in the same way that you might own something in the real world. When you own a physical item, you have complete control over how you use it. You may give it to a friend, sell it on the internet, or toss it out. This is a digital asset with the same type of property rights built into it, allowing you to freely trade, exchange, and utilize it in a variety of online applications. As a result, it’s a brand-new digital permanency.
Forbes: What are the different kinds of entities a person can acquire? Why do individuals require an NFT of a movie or a digital photograph that can be copied?
Finzer: There are many various forms of NFTs, and I believe that thinking about NFTs that represent goods in games is a good place to start because it’s a little more clear. If you play a video game like Fortnite, for example, you may consider the unique clothing your avatar wears as an NFT. Currently, Fortnite does not employ NFTs. The game has its own digital asset management system. However, there are games where the items you use in the game can be openly traded as NFTs. So that’s one form of basic NFT on which a lot of people have already spent billions of dollars, even without using NFTs.
You alluded to the concept of a digital work of art or a digital piece of content that is an entity earlier. And there, I believe the parallel is closer to the physical art world, where you own a physical piece of art but could theoretically have someone produce an exact replica of it. However, holding the original “Mona Lisa” has a special significance in the art world. An art collector would be uninterested in buying a reproduction of the “Mona Lisa” for tens of millions of dollars. The original essay, on the other hand, would pique their curiosity. In the area of digital art, a comparable issue of provenance, actual property rights, and uniqueness is proving to be highly interesting.
Forbes: Let us now shift our attention to the constructors. Who are the people who usually make NFTs?
Finzer: So, to return to the idea that NFTs are a very broad technology that may be employed in a variety of applications, NFTs are being created by game developers and are being used in games. People are experimenting with NFTs as a ticketing system for events. Of course, there’s also the very basic use case of going to a website like ours, uploading a picture, and creating an NFT. Many influencers and celebrities, as well as artists and musicians, are becoming interested in the idea of distributing their content as a one-of-a-kind work of art. For example, football player Rob Gronkowski released a set of special digital trading cards that numbered in the hundreds. That gave his fans a chance to own a small part of his tale. It’s also an intriguing concept because it’s a novel way for producers to make money. They can sell these digital works; perhaps the pieces have some utility, such as a concert ticket, a sports game ticket, or something like.
Forbes: What challenges do blockchains and NFTs answer for creators specifically? Because someone might remark, “That’s fantastic, but why can’t we do this on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace?” What role do blockchains play in filling in the blanks?
Finzer: It’s a fascinating topic, and I’d phrase it differently: blockchains give a basis for new types of applications rather than solving a single problem. Interoperability is provided through blockchains. You can send NFT to any wallet, trading on any marketplace, if you release a trade card on, say, Nifty Gateway, one of the NFT issuers. Imagine being able to not only do that, but also bringing it into a virtual environment or displaying it on a mobile application that works with NFTs. If this were done on AWS, some corporation would establish an API or service that everyone else would have to use, and that service could go down or be utterly unexpected. The blockchain, on the other hand, is that service. It’s fascinating to me since, in isolation, it accomplishes nothing. You’re absolutely correct; you could host it on AWS, but the sort of emergent behavior from the blockchain’s interoperability is that this thing works across hundreds of different applications.
Forbes: How would you rate the current level of interoperability for NFTs? I’m aware that this is a problem that everyone in the crypto/blockchain community is working on.
Finzer: Maybe 40 percent to 50 percent, I’d estimate. On each individual blockchain, I believe there are a lot of really cool interoperability and network effects going on. But there is undoubtedly a jumbled world of several separate blockchains, with apps having to abstract over them. Ethereum has been the most prominent example of this. You can choose from 10 to 20 different wallets here. Because so many different wallet providers have linked with Ethereum marketplaces, you can bring your own wallet. There are marketplaces dedicated solely to art. OpenSea, for example, is a truly open marketplace that allows you to trade anything. There are already three to four virtual world projects, possibly more, where you can take your assets and display them inside a virtual world. There are also a variety of games to choose from. As a result, Ethereum has a very diverse environment. So that’s where it’s been fully realized and where the most interoperability exists. On Ethereum, there are obviously still unresolved issues, such as metadata standards and new programmability criteria for NFTs. However, that diverse ecology is clearly evolving. But, right, the issue with Ethereum is that the underlying network still has some scalability concerns, right? As a result, individuals are still working on it. And other people have said, “OK, let’s simply rebuild everything from the ground up and attempt to establish our own ecosystem.” As a result, there has been some fragmentation in the space.
Forbes: Let’s shift gears for a moment. What is OpenSea, in a nutshell? And why did you think an NFT marketplace was necessary?
Finzer: OpenSea is an NFT marketplace. It’s a location where you may offer your NFTs for sale, as well as buy NFTs. In late 2017, we launched OpenSea. At the time, the first NFT project, CryptoKitties, had just launched, and we were quite thrilled about it since it was the first use case for blockchain that moved straight to a more entertaining, mainstream, consumer use case. We also believed non-fungible assets were a fascinating concept, as contrasted to the majority of blockchain work, which was focused on currencies and fungible assets. We anticipated that additional people would be working on these projects. And sure enough, more game developers, artists, and producers were interested over time, and many of those projects required a marketplace for users to buy and sell items. That’s where OpenSea was born.
Forbes: What types of blockchains do you believe in?
Finzer: On Ethereum, you can trade any NFT. We’ve also recently implemented Polygon support. It’s a Layer 2 Ethereum network.
Forbes: Who frequently mints NFTs on your platform, and who are your most important client segments?
Finzer: It’s a combination. As I have stated, gaming accounts for a significant portion of NFT activity. So there are game designers. There’s a game called “ZED RUN,” for example, which is a horse racing game. OpenSea is a marketplace where players can exchange horses in that game. However, there are other artists who create digital art solely for the purpose of selling it to individuals who wish to support them and own a piece of their work. So I’d say it’s a mix of individuals right now: gamers, crypto aficionados, technologists, artists, and collectors.
Forbes: And, on the buy side, who makes these purchases through the service?
Finzer: Because the technology is so new, I believe that many of the people who are utilizing NFTs today are early adopters; people who may have purchased cryptocurrency in the past and are optimistic about the technology’s future. People who are merely admirers of a certain player or sports team and want to gather a piece of what they have to give are also starting to join in. The Golden State Warriors and I just collaborated on a launch. Fans of the team were drawn in as a result of this.
Forbes: You chose not to offer a token, unlike some other NFT platforms. Can you clarify that decision to me, as well as how OpenSea produces money?
Finzer: We don’t have a token right now, but it’s not something we’re against. I believe we wanted to give it some thought before making a choice. We saw a lot of things./nRead More

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