OpenSea Valued at $13.3 Billion and Nvidia Makes Its Omniverse Free for Individual Creators and Artists
Nameet Potnis
Connecting Music Superfans with Their Tribe and Empowering Artists | Payments & E-commerce Expert
OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, revealed that it had raised $300 million in a Series C fundraising round, valuing the company at $13.3 Billion. Venture firms Paradigm and Coatue lead the round. The company was valued at $1.5 billion as recently as July 2020.
The money will be used to scale up product development and hire more staff, as well as improve customer support and help grow the NFT and Web3 market, according to OpenSea co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer.
"Our vision is to be the destination for these new open digital economies to thrive," Finzer said in an emailed statement. "We'll start this year by lowering the barriers to entry to the NFT space on OpenSea and investing in the ecosystem and the community that powers it.
Shiva Rajaraman, a former Facebook executive, recently joined OpenSea as its new VP of Product. Rajamaran's responsibilities will include assisting the company in supporting NFTs from other blockchains (such as Solana's NFT) and connecting customers to tools for finding digital art and managing their collections.
Paradigm co-founder Fred Ehrsam?tweeted?that the OpenSea founders "have shown true grit over the last four years, weathering uncertainty and sticking to their vision of NFTs as an internet- and world-changing primitive."
China dominated the Bitcoin mining sector at the start of 2021, minting more than half of all new BTC. Chinese Bitcoin mining had vanished by the middle of the year after the government outlawed the process. Meanwhile, it ramped up its plans for a central bank digital currency.
It is an electronic version of the yuan that will eventually replace bills and coins—and began testing the concept in various parts of the country.
China's Apple and Android app stores now have the government's e-CNY (electric Chinese yuan) wallet accessible for download. Like Shanghai and Shenzhen, citizens in the pilot cities can sign up for the trial version. Next month, foreigners will be permitted to use the app at the Winter Olympics activities.
Many governments are looking into central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which are often backed by distributed ledgers like blockchains, to go paperless and improve security while cutting payment costs and speed.?Jamaica has recently completed?its CBDC pilot and?Thailand is soon planning?one.
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By late October, the project's developer, the Digital Currency Research Institute, claimed that over 140 million citizens had established accounts. In contrast, Alipay has been a one-stop shop for financial, having almost 90 per cent of the country's citizens as users.
Government authorities have been organising digital yuan lotteries to encourage locals to use the network, distributing 30 million yuan ($4.7 million) to 150,000 inhabitants of Shenzhen and Suzhou.
Nvidia launched Omniverse, its real-time 3D design collaboration and virtual world simulation platform, free to individual creators and artists at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
New features and integrations for the platform, named "metaverse for engineers," have also been released by the tech giant.
Nvidia's simulation and collaboration platform, the Omniverse, provides the framework for the metaverse, a universe of interconnected virtual worlds. The platform also uses Nvidia technology, such as real-time photorealistic rendering, physics, materials, and interactive workflows between industry-leading 3D software products. Nivida revealed that Over 100,000 creators have downloaded Omniverse.
"We look at it as the same context as an operating system. A rising tide lifts all boats. There will be many avenues for commerce on these virtual worlds. We think there is an entire economy coming for these virtual worlds. The more we can make it available, the better all of us can benefit." Richard Kerris, vice president of the Omniverse platform for Nvidia, said about making Omniverse free for individuals.
"We use it as a company. It's necessary for our different teams to work collectively in a remote way." Kerris added.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed his idea for "many types of metaverses" at a presentation at Computex last summer, including video game versions and augmented reality-based versions featuring non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
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