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OpenSea Acquires Dharma Labs, Plans to Onboard Fiat Payments

BY Langston Thomas

January 18, 2022

The world’s largest NFT marketplace is gearing up to become a whole lot bigger. After a massive year for OpenSea, the leading NFT platform has now acquired crypto wallet startup Dharma.

As part of a four-step plan to scale in 2022, OpenSea has brought on the four-year-old company to help create a more mainstream-friendly way to buy, sell, and mint NFTs. In conjunction with the acquisition, Nadav Hollander, co-founder and CEO of Dharma Labs, has been brought on as OpenSea’s new CTO.

This latest move from OpenSea may very well turn out to be a game-changer. As the marketplace giant has felt both the good and the bad of its prestige over the last year, the folks at Dharma could have a huge impact on not only the inner workings of the platform, but its user interface and experience.

“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,” said co-founder and CEO of OpenSea Devin Finzer via blog post. “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.

As Dharma is best known as a DeFi and crypto-wallet service that enables token lending and swapping directly from users’ bank accounts, this acquisition could present the possibility of fiat being onboarded as a payment method when trading NFTs on OpenSea. As competing marketplaces like Nifty Gateway and Rarible have provided a similar point of sale for quite some time, this integration into the world’s largest NFT platform could mean a major shift in the NFT marketplace race.

“This is going to be no small feat,” said OpenSea’s new CTO Nadav Hollande via Twitter. “If we do our jobs right, some awesome books are going to be written about what this company was like at this time.”

To learn more about the acquisition, visit Dharma’s website or OpenSea’s blog.

Photos courtesy of Dharma.

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