By Tim Hakki
2 min read
Booming NFT marketplace OpenSea has revealed its first chief financial officer: Brian Roberts, the former CFO of ride-sharing app Lyft, according to a new report by Bloomberg.
Roberts worked as head of global corporate development at Microsoft before joining Walmart for three years to lead its mergers and acquisitions teams. (He is not to be confused with longtime Comcast CEO Brian Roberts.)
While the new CFO has no prior experience in the crypto industry, he told Bloomberg that the emerging Web 3 and the NFT sector, in particular, recalls mid-nineties eBay.
Roberts’s newly vacated position at Lyft will be filled by former Amazon Studios and HULU CFO Elaine Paul.
Since August, trade on OpenSea has swelled and often averages over a million NFTs sold every month, according to data collected by Dune Analytics.
Since the summer, the marketplace has attracted nearly 300,000 active users a month, while the daily volume of Ethereum traded on the platform rarely drops below $50 million. Compared to its competitors like SuperRare and Rarible, it’s a clear titan.
Despite the massive growth, Roberts would still like to raise more funds for the platform.
While Roberts acknowledges that OpenSea isn’t in need of any funding to survive, his roadmap for the future entails raising extra investment, which the company could then use for acquisitions and partnerships to promote the growth of the NFT sector.
Roberts also hinted that an OpenSea IPO may soon be on offer, meaning that equity in the company could be sold to the public on a stock exchange for the first time ever.
He even said that with the NFT platform’s growth, “you’d be foolish not to think about it going public.”
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