After facing significant backlash on social media, OpenSea has recently back-pedalled on its plans to go public.
Will OpenSea IPO or not?
It’s been an eventful few days for OpenSea. The NFT trading platform initially announced that it was considering an IPO, only to walk back its plans after a community uproar let the company know what it thought of that in no uncertain terms.
It had all started with CFO Brian Roberts announcing on Bloomberg that “it would be foolish not to think about going public” for the popular trading platform. That did not sit well with the crypto community, which had eagerly been waiting for an OpenSea token and a possible lucrative airdrop rewarding those that had been using it for years. Most commentators and influencers slammed the move as a way of selling out to institutional investors instead of rewarding the community that had been supporting the platform throughout its growth phase.
“Sucks to hear @opensea is selling out and doing an IPO,” was one of the nicer comments on Twitter. Another user said that the possible IPO was “Just another reason why I can’t wait for @Coinbase_NFT. If we are using corporate vehicles, we might as well use the one that won’t go down three times a week.” Yet other denounced OpenSea to be part of “tradfi 2.0” instead of Web3.
Roberts walking back the IPO plans
However, OpenSea was as quick to shelf its plans (for now) as it was to announce them. Brian Roberts blamed the outcry on “inaccurate reporting on OpenSea’s plans” and said the company had never had any serious intentions to go public.
There was inaccurate reporting about @OpenSea‘s plans. Let me set the record straight: there is a big gap between thinking about what an IPO might eventually look like & actively planning one. We are not planning an IPO, and if we ever did, we would look to involve the community.
— Brian Roberts (broberts.eth) (@BKRoberts) December 8, 2021
Whether by accident or by design, OpenSea may know enough now to plan its next move, which at this point will almost have to be a token launch instead of issuing shares. Roberts, previously a senior executive at Lyft, Walmart, and Microsoft, may be excused for trying to follow a working formula he knows from his previous companies, but that is just not how crypto works.
Be careful with the airdrops
Even an OpenSea airdrop will have to be well-planned and executed, as the example of Ribbon Finance shows. While airdrops may be a fantastic way to involve the community and strengthen grassroots support for a project, if badly designed, they can easily backfire and cause the token price to drop to record lows.
With OpenSea hitting record trading volumes of almost $5 billion AUD in August, more eyes than usual will be on the marketplace’s next move. As the crypto space moves at lightning pace, one misstep could cause a previously beloved platform to fall from grace with the community, so OpenSea’s executives are well-advised to listen to their users if the NFT marketplace is to continue its growth.