Reflective essay on the start-up “Open Sea”

Open Sea is the first NFT marketplace in the world. It was founded by only 2
engineers: Alex Atallah and Devin Finzer. The overall business idea behind it is a
marketplace where users can buy, sell NFTs. The last ones appeared in 2021 and
immediately conquered the world: the most famous ones were sold for millions of dollars.
Once such valuable source of investments and trading appeared, the convenient platform
for it was required. Here Open Sea came into the game. Now it is the most popular platform
of buying and selling NFTS.
While considering the future success of the start-up, it is evaluated in 3 perspectives:
innovation, efficiency and scalability. In order to assess the first two of them, Open Sea
Value Proposition(VP) section can be used. I considered VP to be as follows:
 Offering unique and convenient service of buying, selling and collecting NFTs for the
users
 Offering opportunity to raise funds from launching NFT collections for NFT
developers
 Creating the competitive market of NFTs which increases the transparency, growth
and development of the whole NFT world.
From the bullet points above, I can conclude that the start-up is really innovative as they are
pioneers in the NFT platform world. Hence, their services were unique. Moreover, this
platform is efficient as of now users can easily exchange NFTs and save their time and
efforts.
Going further, Amit & Zott framework can easily demonstrate the uniqueness of
value delivered by Open Sea:
 Novelty: the first NFT platform in the world for the fast-growing financial asset
 Lock-in: customers are offered the largest market of NFTs where anyone can find
NFT for the desired price with high variety of services and features.
 Efficiency: Open Sea market was one-of-a-kind, meaning users can use only Open
Sea and nothing else for NFT stuff. Hence, time and efforts of users and developers
are saved.
 Complementarities: Open Sea offers a lot of supplementary services that make users
life much easier: NFT rating, NFT statistics, Chains information, Trends data, Support
center as well as connection with other crypto-related products such as MetaMask.
However, not only Open Sea is innovative and efficient, but it is also very scalable and is
prone to grow and develop. Since the founders are engineering-experts, they are aware of
what should be improved and added. Here are the proves of being scalable:
 Open Sea applications were added on both IOS and Android platforms for higher
convenience
 Open Sea constantly updates the list of blockchains available for transactions on the
platform, while initially Ethereum chain was allowed only.
 Open Sea added the opportunity to list NFT collections
 Open Sea offered interesting collaborations with absolutely different entities. For
instance, NBA clubs, Coca-Cola and Lil Jon. It increases the overall interest of users.

Nevertheless, when it comes to evaluating the future of the idea, the first and foremost risk
is the dependence on NFT popularity. In 2022 the number of transactions dropped
significantly compared to 2021. It resulted in the lower performance of Open Sea. Hence,
Open Sea success is controlled by the world of NFT. Thus, in my opinion, expanding their
services can be considered.
To conclude, Open Sea offered a unique idea of NFT market. It demonstrated
innovativeness, scalability and efficiency. However, the major risk for its future is overall
sentiment in NFT world that drives Open Sea. Finally, when it comes to the final decision, I
think Open Sea can be invested in as they are the pioneers and leaders in the fast-growing
crypto-world.