All Hail The Crypto Unicorn: NFT Auction House OpenSea Hits $1.5B Valuation

OpenSea, an online non fungible token (NFT) auction house, hit a valuation of $1.5 billion after its latest funding round.

What Happened: According to a Tuesday TechCrunch report, OpeSea raised $100 million in its Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing the firm to a valuation of $1.5 billion.

Other investors include Coatue, CAA, Michael Ovitz, Kevin Hartz, Kevin Durant, and Ashton Kutcher.

The announcement follows March's Series A funding round, where the firm raised $23 million.

OpenSea purportedly saw $160 million in sales last month and is expected to exceed this figure in July, the firm's CEO Devin Finzer told TechCrunch.

Why It Matters: Since the platform saw a major obstacle to its growth in Ethereum's ETH/USD scalability limitations and the consequent sky-high transaction fees, OpenSea is now planning to expand its service to multiple blockchains in search of a long-term solution.

This expansion will start with Polygon MATIC/USD, which will purportedly allow the firm to completely eliminate fees for both token creators and marketplace users.

Read also: DeFi Platform Partners With Georgian Government To Tokenize The Country's Fine Wine As NFTs

According to Finzer, the absence of fees grants OpenSea higher probabilities of success in its bid to expand, including in the gaming and events industries.

Other than Polygon, OpenSea plans to expand to the Flow FLOW/USD — created by the first NFT creators behind the world-famous digital collectible cats CryptoKitties — and Tezos XTZ/USD blockchains.