OpenSea CMO tells Cryptopolitan: We’re building one app for NFTs, meme coins, perps, and major cryptos

OpenSea is not trying to live only as the place people remember from the NFT boom. At Consensus Miami on Thursday, Adam Hollander, the company’s chief marketing officer, told Karnika E. Yashwant, also known as Mr. KEY, the founder and CEO of KEY Difference Media, that OpenSea is now building around NFTs, meme coins, perps, and major cryptos inside one non-custodial app.

Mr. KEY opened the interview by asking Adam to explain how he got here, saying, “How did you come in here? What are you up to?”

Adam said he first built a software company that was sold to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), then spent years learning how products are built and marketed at a much larger scale.

He explained that:

I left Microsoft, came back to Austin, Texas, and I became the chief operating officer of a medical education company for four and a half years. After that, I spent several years as a collector, a trader, and dove very deep down the rabbit hole of NFTs and digital ownership and started really being a public evangelist for a lot of the technology that we all believe in and are so excited about even, you know, all the way through today. And a little over a year ago, I was talking 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 making users learn every chain

Adam said most people at the event would still call OpenSea the world’s largest NFT marketplace, but the product really has changed a lot.

“You can now trade major crypto. You can trade meme coins, perps all across 26 chains,” Adam said. He added that users can do that without bridging, while keeping their wallets, assets, and chains together in one portfolio.

Adam said the new OpenSea is built for people who care about holding their own assets instead of leaving everything inside closed apps. “If you care about non-custodial ownership over your crypto and your assets, OpenSea is really the best place to discover, own, or trade anything on-chain.”

According to Adam, the idea behind digital ownership was always strong, but a lot of 2021 and 2022 buyers were not buying 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, though, 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, “So, how long has OpenSea’s new product rollout been happening?” Adam told us that OpenSea rebuilt the platform from the ground up about a year ago through OS2 because the old version was not built for the kind of product the company now wants.

Adam said that reset was all about rails. “We realized that the foundations of OpenSea, the rails that sit behind everything, in the original version of OpenSea, they weren’t built to be able to do everything that I just mentioned,” he said. “And so it became very complicated for us to need to have additional pillars of how people want to discover, trade, and own things on-chain.”

OpenSea Mobile brings Apple Pay, beta testers, and agent trading into the plan

The coming OpenSea Mobile app is where Adam said the wider strategy starts to look more like a consumer product. He said the app can create a wallet in seconds, let users double-click Apple Pay through Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), convert fiat into crypto, and then spend that crypto across 26 chains.

Adam said the point is not to remove power from advanced users. “The average person just needs to know that they have a certain amount of money and they can go buy the things that they want to buy,” he said.

Mr. KEY then asked for numbers, saying, “Give me numbers. What do the users that are using this new side of the platform look like, not the NFT side, all the new features that you’re building up, the wallet creation numbers, the text volumes?”

Adam said he did not have every exact number off the top of his head, but he does know that more than 1 million wallets joined OpenSea’s recent rewards program, and hundreds of thousands of unique users are active across the platform through token trading, NFTs, and other products.

He also said the rewards program was switched off about a month ago, so current users are not there only because of that campaign.

Mr. KEY followed up on the user mix, asking, “So with this initial set of users you have, do you categorize them as crypto people or the new people from outside?”

Adam said most current users are already crypto-native and bring non-custodial wallets to OpenSea. But the OS mobile is aimed at people outside that world.

Adam said around 600 beta testers are already trying OpenSea Mobile through one-on-one hour-long sessions with the company’s marketing and engineering teams. “And we’ve been collecting that feedback to improve the product, to figure out the right positioning for the product, and to make sure that when we do release this out to the masses, that it’s something that will be really special,” said Adam.

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 the assets across all the chains, is better than DeBank or CoinStats or other applications out there?”

Adam said OpenSea has an edge because it sees cultural on-chain behavior through NFTs, so it has “a very powerful recommendation.”

DeFi is not part of the first release. Mr. KEY asked, “Has this worked with DeFi as well?”

Adam said the app is not starting with DeFi connections because the focus is direct asset ownership, not sending funds into protocols for yield. Perps are part of the app, but Adam said DeFi can be evaluated later.

Mr. KEY then asked how OpenSea fits when banks are also trying to reach normal users. Adam’s answer was that most of those products are custodial, while OpenSea is betting on user-owned wallets, open access to apps, and support for NFTs and tokenized assets beside major crypto and meme coins.

Adam said many large custodial crypto 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 roll out until we possibly get to a bull market?”

Adam said the app launch is the next step, followed by marketing outside the current crypto bubble. He also said OpenSea is preparing for agentic trading, with an MCP server and API that let agents buy, sell, list, trade, and bid across NFTs, meme coins, and major cryptos.