- Coatue has also marked down its investment in MoonPay by 90%.
- On November 3, OpenSea announced it would be reducing its workforce by 50%.
Coatue Management, a U.S.-based technology investment firm, has decreased the valuation of its investment in the OpenSea NFT marketplace by 90%.
Documents obtained by The Information on November 7 indicated that Coatue has lowered its investment from $120 million to $13 million, implying that OpenSea’s estimated value has fallen to $1.4 billion.
Coatue also similarly reduced its investment in MoonPay, a Web3 payment processing company, by 90%. OpenSea’s $300 million Series C funding round was led by cryptocurrency venture capital firms Paradigm and Coatue in January 2022. Following the substantial funding, the NFT platform was valued at $13.3 billion.
Challenges Persist
Additionally, OpenSea announced on November 3 that it would be halving its workforce as part of its transition to OpenSea 2.0. This decision follows a lengthy bear market and a year-long decrease in NFT trading volumes.
According to OpenSea CEO Devin Fizner, the next iteration of the platform will focus on technological enhancements, as well as improvements in speed and quality. Fizner believes that maintaining a smaller team will enable the platform to remain “agile and responsive.”
In August, OpenSea faced criticism for eliminating the operator filter, a feature that allowed creators to exclude marketplaces that did not enforce royalties.
Amid declining NFT trading volumes, Coatue has scaled back its investment. Industry sales peaked at nearly $14 billion in 2021. Since the onset of this downturn in March 2022, NFT trading volumes have plummeted by an extraordinary 80%.
According to a report from crypto analytics firm DappRadar published on November 3, the NFT market experienced its first monthly growth in nearly a year in October, with a month-over-month increase of $99 million.
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