NFT Marketplace OpenSea Buys Ethereum Wallet Maker Dharma Labs

By Mat Di Salvo

NFT marketplace OpenSea will buy Ethereum wallet company Dharma Labs. Devin Finzer, OpenSea's CEO and co-founder, today said in a statement that the acquisition would help the marketplace grow in 2022 and improve the "technical reliability" of its products, which are currently prone to outages.

Dharma Labs' co-founder and CEO, Nadav Hollander, will become OpenSea's new chief technology officer. Dharma Labs is the company behind the Dharma Ethereum wallet that lets its users borrow and lend digital assets. 

It has not yet been disclosed how much OpenSea will spend to buy Dharma. Axios reported earlier this month that the deal would fall in the $110 million to $130 million range.

Finzer said in the statement that "the team at Dharma is among the most talented and respected consumer crypto teams in the world."

"Our teams share a vision that NFTs will be the cultural focal point of crypto's adoption for years to come—and that vision can only be realized if using NFTs becomes easy & delightful for the average person," he added. 

Finzer also said that Hollander's priorities at OpenSea will be to "improve the technical reliability and uptime of our products" and to build "Web3-native mechanisms for engaging with and rewarding our early and loyal community."

OpenSea is the biggest marketplace for NFTs—or non-fungible tokens. Earlier this month, it was valued at $13.3 billion. 

And monthly trading volume on the website is now as high as $3.5 billion. 

This is because interest in NFTs continues to grow. NFTs, digital tokens representing anything from art, video clips and music which exist on blockchain networks (typically Ethereum), have taken off among art collectors and have been particularly popular with celebrities. 

Dharma Labs said in a separate statement that its app will shutdown over the next 30 days, and users will have to empty their wallets before February 18.

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