After the NFT market collapse forced OpenSea to lay off more than half its staff, the once-dominant NFT marketplace has undergone a dramatic transformation. The company is no longer limiting itself to digital art and collectibles, it’s now positioning itself as a universal crypto trading hub, where users can buy and sell all types of tokens across multiple blockchains.
Under CEO Devin Finzer, OpenSea has expanded its platform to aggregate buy and sell orders from leading decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap and Meteora, covering trades across 22 blockchains. This pivot allows the platform to capture the explosive interest in memecoins and other trending assets. OpenSea now takes a 0.9% fee per transaction, and in just the first two weeks of October 2025, it processed $1.6 billion in crypto trades, its highest volume in over three years.
Finzer credits his wife, Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo, an early crypto investor and former trading fund manager, with inspiring the pivot to a “trade-any-crypto” model. Together, they mapped out the architecture to integrate liquidity from multiple blockchains into one seamless interface. “I really consider her a silent cofounder of OpenSea 2.0,” Finzer said.
OpenSea’s new approach prioritizes self-custody, allowing users to manage their assets directly without the need for traditional know-your-customer (KYC) checks. Finzer argues that this setup is fundamentally different from custodial exchanges like Coinbase, since OpenSea never holds user funds. Instead, the company employs analytics firm TRM Labs to screen wallets for sanctioned addresses and potential money laundering risks.
While the shift toward a full-fledged trading aggregator marks OpenSea’s boldest reinvention yet, it also brings new challenges, from heightened regulatory scrutiny to fierce competition among global exchanges. Still, Finzer believes the platform’s evolution is the right move for a fast-changing market. “You can’t fight the macro trend,” he said.
“Crypto is about letting people trade whatever they want, wherever they want, and that’s exactly what we’re building.”
