OpenSea said on Tuesday that it had bought Dharma Labs, a digital wallet for cryptocurrencies, for an undisclosed amount, and said that Dharma's chief executive officer would become OpenSea's chief technology officer.
OpenSEA, which was founded in 2017 and valued at US $13.3 billion in its latest round of venture funding, said the deal would help it improve the experience of buying, minting and selling NFTs on its marketplace.
NFTs are a type of digital asset that exist on the record-keeping technology, which is known as a non-fungible token. They have exploded in popularity over the last year, with people buying artwork and video highlights from sports games as NFTs.
The sales of NFTs reached some US $25 billion in 2021, according to data from market tracker DappRadar, although there were signs of growth slowing towards the end of the year.
Open Sea didn't share the financial terms of the deal. Axios, which reported the talks, said Dharma Labs raised $15 million in funding. Crunchbase raised $7.1 million, according to the data released by Crunchbase.
Open Sea said that the company's current CTO Alex Atallah would step into a new externally facing role overseeing the company's web 3 and NFT ecosystem development, as Dharma Labs Chief Executive Nadav Hollander takes over Atallah's position.
Web 3 is a broad term used to describe a decentralized next phase of the internet run on a block chain, where users would have ownership stakes in platforms.
In 2021, NFTs exploded into mainstream consciousness in a way few could have imagined, and OpenSea grew almost 1000 x in a matter of days, Hollander said. We have the opportunity to build a truly generational product. I'm excited to be able to scale OpenSea's tech to meet the reliability, performance, and uptime benchmarks that its users expect and deserve. Open Sea said Dharma Labs' app would be shut down.