Boys in the Bubble

Startups are supposed to specialize, but OPENSEA's founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah thrived by building a wide-open market for creating and trading all manner of NFTs, whether art, music or gaming. Their five-person startup had built a platform on which users could create, buy and sell all sorts of nonfungible tokens (NFTs)--computer files used to track ownership of unique digital assets like art and music on a ledger known as a blockchain. In February 2021, the NFT market roused from hibernation--and went crazy. In July 2021, OpenSea processed $350 million in NFT trades. That same month, in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, it raised $100 million in venture capital at a $1.5 billion valuation. Now that they're cenitimillionaires and poised to become/billionaires, they have other worries: competitors, fraudsters, and the next crypto crash.