OpenSea doesn’t just try to live where people remember $NFT tree. At Consensus Miami on Thursday, Adam Hollander, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, told Karnika E. Yashwant, aka Mr. KEY, the founder and CEO of KEY Difference Media, which is now building OpenSea around NFTs, meme coins, offenders and major cryptos in one non-custodial app.
Mr. KEY opened the interview by asking Adam to explain how he got here, saying, “How did you get here? What are you up to?”
Adam said he first built a software company that was sold to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and then spent years learning how products are built and brought to market on a much larger scale.
He explained that:
I left Microsoft, returned to Austin, Texas, and became Chief Operating Officer of a medical education company for four and a half years. Then I spent a number of years as a collector and trader, and I went very deep into the rabbit hole of NFTs and digital ownership and really became a public evangelist for a lot of the technology that we all believe in and are so excited about even to this day. And a little over a year ago I spoke with Devin, the CEO of OpenSea, and I decided to come on board as their Chief Marketing Officer.
Adam says OpenSea is trying to make crypto usable without requiring users to learn every chain
Adam said most people at the event would still call OpenSea the largest in the world $NFT marketplace, but the product has really changed a lot.
“You can now trade major cryptos. You can trade meme coins, perpetrators across 26 chains,” Adam said. He added that users can do that without bridging, while keeping their wallets, assets and chains together in one wallet.
Adam said the new OpenSea is built for people who want to keep their own assets instead of leaving everything in closed apps. “If you’re concerned about non-custodial ownership of your crypto and your assets, OpenSea is truly the best place to discover, own or trade anything on-chain.”
According to Adam, the idea behind digital ownership has always been strong, but many buyers in 2021 and 2022 bought not because they cared about the art, community, access or utility, but rather because they were betting that someone else would pay more later.
The real point, however, is the ability to prove who owns a digital asset, see where it came from, and track its history over time.
Mr. KEY then asked, “How long has the introduction of new OpenSea products been taking?” Adam told us that OpenSea rebuilt the platform from the ground up via OS2 about a year ago, because the old version wasn’t built for the kind of product the company wants now.
Adam said reset was all about rails. “We realized that the foundations of OpenSea, the rails that are behind everything, in the original version of OpenSea were not built to do everything I just mentioned,” he said. “And so it became very complicated for us to need additional pillars for the way people want to discover, trade and own things on-chain.”
OpenSea Mobile brings Apple Pay, beta testers and broker trading into the plan
Adam said the upcoming OpenSea Mobile app is starting to make the broader strategy look more like a consumer product. He said the app can create a wallet in seconds, let users double-click on Apple Pay through Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), convert fiat into crypto and then spend that crypto on 26 chains.
Adam said it’s not about taking away power from advanced users. “The average person just needs to know that they have a certain amount of money and that they can buy the things they want to buy,” he said.
Mr. KEY then asked for numbers and said: “Give me numbers. What do the users using this new side of the platform look like, not the $NFT side, all the new features you’re building, the wallet creation numbers, the text volumes?
Adam said he didn’t have every exact number memorized, but he does know that more than 1 million wallets have joined OpenSea’s recent rewards program, and hundreds of thousands of unique users are active on the platform through token trading, NFTs and other products.
He also said that the rewards program was disabled about a month ago, so current users aren’t there just because of that campaign.
Moving on to the user mix, Mr. KEY asked: “So with this first group of users that you have, do you categorize them as crypto people or as the new people from outside?”
Adam said that most current users are already crypto-native and are bringing non-custodial wallets to OpenSea. But the OS mobile is aimed at people outside that world.
Adam said about 600 beta testers are already trying out OpenSea Mobile through hour-long one-on-one sessions with the company’s marketing and engineering teams. “And we’ve taken that feedback to improve the product, to find the right positioning for the product, and to make sure that when we release this to the masses, it’s going to be something really special,” Adam said.
Mr. KEY also asked whether OpenSea’s discovery system is better than tools like DeBank or CoinStats, saying: “Would you say that your discovery engine, which discovers all assets across all chains, is better than DeBank or CoinStats or other applications out there?”
Adam said OpenSea has an edge because it sees on-chain cultural behavior through NFTs, so it has “a very strong recommendation.”
DeFi is not part of the initial release. Mr. KEY asked: “Has this worked with DeFi?”
Adam said the app doesn’t start with DeFi connections because its focus is on direct ownership of assets, rather than sending money to protocols for returns. Perpetrators are part of the app, but Adam said DeFi could be evaluated later.
Mr. KEY then asks how OpenSea works if banks are also trying to reach normal users. Adam’s response was that most of these products are custodial, while OpenSea is betting on user wallets, open access to apps, and support for NFTs and tokenized assets in addition to major crypto and meme coins.
Adam said that many major crypto custody platforms still do not properly support NFTs. His strongest line came there: “Nobody can touch it with a 100-foot pole.”
Mr. KEY ended by asking, “How do you see the next one to two years going until we potentially reach a bull market?”
Adam said the app launch is the next step, followed by marketing outside of the current crypto bubble. He also said that OpenSea is gearing up for agentic trading, with an MCP server and API that will allow agents to buy, sell, list, trade and bid on NFTs, meme coins and major cryptos.