OpenSea’s new CFO Brian Roberts faced a firestorm of complaints from the NFT community supported what he said was "inaccurately reported" comments.
The world’s high nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea has denied it intends to pursue a public listing any time shortly.
Chief financial officer (CFO) Brian Roberts sparked a public backlash on once he told Bloomberg that “it would be foolish to not suppose going public.” .
The statement caused an uproar among OpenSea's crypto native NFT community, several of who see a public listing of the platform as a sell resolute giant institutional investors. The vast majority of users on OpenSea execute transactions below $10,000 at a time.
"Sucks to hear @opensea is selling out and doing an IPO," wrote Twitter user @Punk_2070, complaining the community rather than VCs had driven its success.
"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."
Users also appeared miffed that a share market listing would place paid to rumors the platform was progressing to delivery governance tokens to long community members during a similar fashion to Uniswap.
But Roberts apparently sees the full factor as a misunderstanding and he blessed “inaccurate coverage on Opensea’s plans” relating to going public in a Dec. 8 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."
Whether governed by the community or listed on the stock exchange, the NFT marketplace is hot property, recording $2 billion in commerce volume from 1.1 million transactions and nearly 250,000 users over the past 30 days alone. The platform takes 2.5% from each trade, which means it earned over $50 million in revenue in that period of time.
( Brian Newar, Cointelegraph, 2021)