It can feel like it’s been a few years since OpenSea announced the funding round that pushed the valuation to $13 billion. It was January.
At the time, this column delved into the company’s financial performance and came to a number of conclusions, most notably that the company was generating a lot of revenue. That meant OpenSea looked somewhat cheap at its $13 billion price tag when compared to the revenue multiples other unicorns were getting in new, aggressive venture capital rounds.
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But we were also cautious, noting that Coinbase’s earnings were more conservative than OpenSea’s, which gave us a break from the noted growth and profitability of the well-known crypto exchange.
We summarize it as follows:
It looks like the new OpenSea valuation is cheap compared to recent fundamentals, but a little expensive considering how much the market is going up and down. Last year alone, NFTs had several cycles of interest. NFTs are a hectic space and the rules of engagement are far from resolved. In fact, Coinbase is getting into the NFT game and OpenSea is probably too expensive for the crypto trading store to buy right now. So it will be an exciting year for the two.
That turned out to be true much faster than we expected. So let’s collect recent OpenSea market data, run our usual round of valuation calculations, and then compare where the NFT market’s valuation stands today compared to both its own financial performance and publicly traded comparables.
The last time we looked at OpenSea, we were a little more impressed than we expected. Let’s see if that happens again.
The Q2 NFT Market
If you read londonbusinessblog.com+ regularly, you may have seen two glimpses of the NFT market on our pages in the past few weeks. At the beginning of June, we stated that the market was indeed collapsing, and based on the data available at the time, we were very confident.