OpenSea’s plans to go public draw huge backlash from crypto users that expected the platform to perform a token drop instead. Opensea even hired a new chief financial officer who said that he is working on the upcoming IPO as we reported in our cryptocurrency’s latest news.
Amid the surge in NFT trading volume over the past few months, one question went around the crypto users which was, will OpenSea reward the users with a token airdrop? Now that the company signaled plans for an upcoming initial public offering, some crypto users fear that the token airdrop won’t happen. Today the NFT marketplace announced the hiring of Brian Roberts as its Chief Financial Officer and hired him from Lyft where he held the same title. Roberts helped Lyft go public and said that he is planning the IPO of the platform already:
“When you have a company growing as fast as this one, you’d be foolish not to think about it going public,” adding it “would be well-received in the public market given its growth.”
Imagine being the largest and most successful NFT marketplace yet choosing to go for IPO instead of issuing token.
NGMI.
— Arthur (@arthur0x) December 6, 2021
He could be right about the last thing. Coinbase went public back in April and launched a frenzy of investments and attention with some seeing it as the most exciting IPO in years. Coinbase smashed the NASDAQ reference price upon launch and showed that Wall Street was ready for crypto. However, not everyone was happy to see a crypto-centric company go the traditional IPO route but Coinbase’s first hire who is now CEO of Polychian Capital, Olaf Carlson-Wee said that he thinks the exchange will be more valuable by launching and listing its own ETH token instead. With word of the OpenSea impending IPO plans, other crypto natives are lamenting the NFT plans to shun community ownership via governance tokens.
The booming NFT marketplace OpenSea hired its first CFO from Lyft, Brian Roberts who previously worked as a head of global corporate development at Microsoft before he joined Walmart and worked there for three years to lead its mergers and acquisitions. While the new CFO has no experience in the crypto sector, he said that the emerging Web3 and NFT sector reminds him of the mid-90s eBay.
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