OpenSea Acquires Crypto Wallet Startup Dharma Labs, Appoints New CTO

OpenSea acquires crypto wallet startup Dharma Labs and appoints Dharma Labs co-founder and CEO Nadav Hollander as new CTO.
Image source: OpenSea

Quick take:

  • OpenSea has acquired Dharma Labs.
  • Dharma Labs co-founder and CEO Nadav Hollander will step into his new role of CTO at OpenSea.
  • Dharma Labs will be shutting down its wallet in 30 days.

OpenSea announced on Jan 18 that it has acquired crypto wallet startup Dharma Labs and has appointed Dharma Labs co-founder and CEO Nadav Hollander as the new CTO.

Hollander’s new role will see him improving “the technical reliability and uptime of OpenSea’s products”, and building “web3-native mechanisms for engaging with and rewarding OpenSea’s early and loyal community”.

This comes after Axios first reported on Jan 4 that OpenSea was in talks with Dharma Labs for the acquisition deal. Recently, Opensea saw its market value rocket to more than $13 billion after closing a $300 million Series C funding round.

Following the acquisition, Dharma Labs aims to eventually integrate key components of its infrastructure into OpenSeas’ products in order to make it easy for anyone to buy, sell, and mint NFTs. However, the Dharma wallet app will not be part of that integration as it does not fit in with OpenSea’s product suite.

“The team at Dharma is among the most talented and respected consumer crypto teams in the world, having built beloved experiences for seamlessly onboarding fiat currency to blockchains. Our teams share a vision that NFTs will be the cultural focal point of crypto’s adoption for years to come — and that vision can only be realized if using NFTs becomes easy & delightful for the average person,” OpenSea CEO and co-founder Devin Finzer wrote in his blog post.

Before co-founding Dharma Labs, Hollander was software engineer at Coinbase. With him as OpenSea’s new CTO, OpenSea’s co-founder and previous CTO Alex Atallah will be stepping into a new externally facing role focusing on “web3 ecosystem development, security, and investment” with the company’s newly formed NFT Security Group

The group will be partnering with “more than 15 companies & projects to share vulnerabilities and fixes before they reach other platforms”. Current participants include Polygon, Rarible, SuperRare and Coinbase, amongst others.

Brendan Forster, co-founder and COO of Dharma Labs, will also take on a leadership role at OpenSea as its Head of Strategy, “injecting a web3-native perspective into product, business, community, and marketing.”

Over the next 30 days, Dharma Labs will be sunsetting its wallet app, providing free transfers on Polygon regardless of size and free transfers on Ethereum if funds are less than $100. Users will have to empty their wallets before Feb 18.

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