The first NFT billionaires: 4 things you need to know about Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah

The world’s first NFT billionaires have officially arrived. Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah are the two co-founders of Opensea, the largest NFT marketplace in the world. How did they get here? 

1. They were already impressive entrepreneurs

Devin Finzer previously founded Coursekick, a platform that helped university students pick their own classes and see the classes their friends signed up for. One of the most interesting facts about this venture is that one of the co-founders was Dylan Field. Field is now the CEO of Figma, valued at around $10 billion. 

Atallah was the CTO of hostess.fm, acquired by Beatport in 2014. Before launching OpenSea with Finzer, Atallah won hackathons and designed cybersecurity products for Palantir, the secretive Peter Thiel-led Big Data startup. In an insane coincidence, Atallah had also founded a social network at Stanford called Dormlink, similar to Finzer launching Coursekick.

2. OpenSea had an incredible year

Both NFT billionaires have made it clear that the NFT boom of 2021 was possible because of multiple factors, not just one driving force. Alex Atallah said in a past interview that digital artists haven’t been able to monetize their work properly, and NFTs represented a unique opportunity in terms of monetization. 

Specifically, NFTs allow artists to get “valued directly by their true fans.” He mentions the 1,000 true fans concept, popularized by Kevin Kelly. Of course, the cryptocurrency community also rallied behind NFTs, as did many influencers, celebrities, and large corporations. 

NFT sales hit $25 billion in 2021, and OpenSea captured 60% of the market. The company is now valued at over $13 billion. There’s no way around it: OpenSea is the largest and most powerful company in the NFT sector as of right now.

3. They went through YCombinator

Interestingly enough, the pair got accepted to YCombinator – but it wasn’t because they had come up with the OpenSea concept. Instead, the duo brainstormed and developed a business where individuals can access tokens just by sharing their WiFi routers. The project was called WifiCoin.

For those who don’t know, YCombinator is a legendary startup accelerator that has launched over 3000 companies. Some of the biggest companies it has helped launch include Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash, and more. 

4. CryptoKitties changed everything

Some of the most innovative entrepreneurs know more than when to launch a business: they also know when it’s time to pivot completely. On their FIRST DAY at YCombinator; they decided to build OpenSea instead. The reason was simple: they noticed that CryptoKitties was exploding as a project in 2017.

Atallah and Finzer were fascinated that these weren’t people looking to profit from crypto trading as much as they were interested in playing games centered around the collectibles and being part of a community. The fact that CryptoKitties was powerful enough to cause congestion issues on Ethereum was also encouraging to the duo.

5. The first NFT Billionaires aren’t finished

For all the NFT critics, Alex Atallah summarizes the importance of NFTs quite well. He says: “Now that true digital ownership is possible, you can have things in the digital world like you own things in the physical world, where you have full control over it, and can sell it, give it up, keep it… it’s not tied to any one website or platform in particular, it’s an actual good.”

There are many NFT criticisms out there, but critics can’t deny the growth here. When OpenSea first launched four years ago, it only made $28,000 in its first month. OpenSea had record-breaking monthly NFT sales in 2022. 

It’s been a little over four years since it first launched, and OpenSea is still one of the biggest names among NFT marketplaces. Given that NFTs will play a critical role in the metaverse, it’s likely that OpenSea – and the NFT billionaires behind it – will continue to succeed.