Venture capitalist Andreesen Horowitz has further expanded its involvement in the NFT sector. But Ashton Kutcher also insisted on participating in the financing round.
What is hype? According to Duden, it is either a “rousing advertisement that causes euphoric enthusiasm for a product”, a “deception staged for reasons of publicity” or a “wave of superficial enthusiasm”. If you look at the ridiculous sums of money for which non-fungible tokens have already changed hands, the NFT market seems to meet at least some of these attributes. But the fact that a “wave of enthusiasm” can also turn into a tsunami can already be seen in the example of Bitcoins. This has so far given the lie to the obligatory prophecies of doom after every dip. Meanwhile, venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz seems to be certain that non-fungible tokens have also come to stay. As it became known on July 20th, a16z has again participated as a lead investor in an investment round for the NFT marketplace OpenSea involved.
$ 100 million from a16z, Ashton Kutcher and Co.
Like OpensSea on his blog notifies, the project has raised a further USD 100 million in a financing round for the expansion of its platform. In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, numerous angel investors were also involved in the investment round. Hollywood celebrities also met with actor Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher is not a crypto newbie. He was already promoting Bitcoin in 2013. The Hollywood star has already shown an excellent nose as an investor with early investments in Uber, Spotify and Airbnb. Most recently, Kutcher focused more and more on the Boom sector NFT.
OpenSea’s multi-blockchain future starts with polygon
As with most decentralized applications (dApps), Ethereum has so far set the tone in terms of NFT. However, since this pole position is not set in stone, NFT platforms would do well to set up multiple tracks. Hence, it is little wonder that OpenSea also does not want to prescribe a single technology. In a first step towards the multi-blockchain platform, OpenSea has now opened an NFT marketplace on Polygon. So it says in the communication at the end of the financing round:
As NFTs penetrate mainstream consciousness, the technology behind them also continues to evolve: the past few years have witnessed a Cambrian explosion of new blockchains and scaling solutions. Today we officially announce cross-blockchain support, starting with a gas-fee-free marketplace on the Polygon Blockchain.
The outsourcing to the polygon network eliminates the sometimes exorbitant transaction fees that have made the NFT and DeFi space an expensive pleasure, especially for small investors.