Quick take:
- Atallah’s last day will be on July 30.
- He wants to focus on building something “from zero to one.”
- He will take the month off in August and “try to do nothing.”
OpenSea’s co-founder, Alex Atallah, has announced that he is stepping away from the NFT marketplace, but will remain on its board. His last day will be on Jul 30.
He said that he will be taking a month off in August to “try to do nothing” but would be “getting back into crypto and building new things.”
Atallah co-founded OpenSea with CEO Devin Finzer in 2018 and raised $2 million in the company’s seed round announced in May that year. At that point, the NFT marketplace saw just $500k in volume in two months and had just 100 collections listed. Four years on, OpenSea now has two million NFT collections and over 80 million NFTs.
The company was valued at $13.3 billion in January. According to Forbes, both Atallah and Finzer have a net worth of $2.2 billion each.
Prior to his decision to leave OpenSea, Atallah has been transferring the functions of his role to various members of OpenSea’s senior executives. Atallah said he played many different roles in the company, both technical and non-technical.
During the NFT boom last year, Atallah and Finzer started expanding OpenSea’s team to include senior executives who would lead the core functions of the company.
Last May when OpenSea was entering hypergrowth, the company hired Ryan Foutty to take over business development and partnerships from Atallah. In October, Atallah handed over the reins of community and customer support to Anne Fauvre-Willis.
Following that, Whitney Steele joined OpenSea as VP of marketing. In January this year, Atallah stepped down from his role as OpenSea’s CTO after the company acquired crypto wallet startup, Dharma Labs.
As part of the acquisition, Dharma Labs co-founder and CEO, Nadav Hollander, was appointed as OpenSea’s new CTO while Atallah led the NFT Security Group and OpenSea Ventures.
As Atallah steps down from his role, Kevin Pawlak will continue leading the venture arm while 0age, who is head of protocol at OpenSea, will represent the NFT Security Group. A new VP of engineering, Marko Iskander, will join OpenSea next week.
“OpenSea will always be a part of me. I couldn’t possibly stop thinking about the exciting problems we solve every day, even if I tried. Devin has done an incredible job stewarding OpenSea to heights we never predicted. And now that we have all of you, I know I can venture on – with full confidence that you’ll continue building and growing OpenSea in the right direction,” Atallah wrote in a blog post announcing his departure.
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