On January 18, OpenSea announced that it had purchased Dharma Labs, a crypto lending platform and digital wallet, for an undisclosed amount. Based on their official statement, Dharma Labs would effectively close down and its co-founders Brendan Forster and Nadav Hollander, will now become the new Head of Strategy and Chief Technology Officer at OpenSea, respectively.
The NFT marketplace (OpenSea) acquired the nearly 5-year-old DeFi protocol but never shared the involved financial terms. OpenSea insisted that the acquisition will help in accomplishing its mission to scale product development, expand its team, grow its safety and reliability efforts, and invest in the Web3 and NFT ecosystem.
I’m happy to finally share that we’ve acquired @Dharma_HQ to help us scale our engineering, product and customer support! https://t.co/NnJdSFBzvo
— Devin Finzer (dfinzer.eth) (@dfinzer) January 18, 2022
OpenSea’s co-founder and CEO, Devin Finzer, thinks that the ‘union’ between the marketplace and Dharma Labs will:
“Help us dramatically improve the experience of buying, minting, and selling NFTs on OpenSea.”
He also said that the two firms 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.”
Being the new CTO at OpenSea, Hollander’s is expected to utilize his expertise to enhance their products’ technical reliability and uptime and build Web3-native mechanisms that reward loyal community members.
Based on a statement from Dharma Labs, its Dharma Smart Wallet will be deactivated within 30 days. It, therefore, urges the users to withdraw and sell their funds before February 18, 2022 and clarifies that they will not have to pay fees to do so.
Furthermore, OpenSea announced the development of a private NFT Security Group that will help in promoting and steering investment efforts and combat security and safety challenges that face Web3 and the general NFT ecosystem. Alex Atallah, the co-Founder, and current CTO will assume the role of overseeing the group’s development.
