Venture fund Tiger Global reduces its stake in OpenSea NFT marketplace by 94%

Earlier, the firm completely wrote off $38 million of investments in the collapsed FTX

01.12.2023 - 13:56

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3 min

What’s new? Investors in Tiger Global’s largest venture capital fund have recorded unrealized losses of 18% after the managers changed the composition of the portfolio, Bloomberg writes, citing sources. Thus, the fund Private Investment Partners 15 (PIP 15) with assets worth about $13 billion reduced stakes in the popular NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and OpenSea NFT marketplace by 69% and 94% of the original investment amount.

Bloomberg’s material

What else is known? Also, PIP 15 reduced stakes in the mail service based on artificial intelligence technology Superhuman and confidential search engine DuckDuckGo by 45% and 72%, respectively. Earlier, Tiger Global itself, which manages $50 billion in assets, fully wrote off its $38 million investments in bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.

In early November, one of the funds of the investment firm Coatue with assets of $7,7 billion also reduced its stake in OpenSea by 90%.

Experts of the analytical platform CryptoRank report that the market share of the OpenSea marketplace has fallen from 95% to 34,3% since November 2021. Its younger competitor Blur, which only appeared in October 2022, currently holds 65% of the market by now.

Source: Twitter.com

Analysts write that OpenSea had a first-mover advantage and monopolized the market for a certain period. After it introduced a 2,5% fee for each transaction. In addition, it obliged users to pay royalties to collection creators, which significantly worsened its position.

In turn, Blur offers a user-friendly platform, zero fees, airdrops, and revenue-generating tools with gamification elements, CryptoRank noted. On November 21, the Blur team also launched a profitable network of the second Layer (L2), Blast, based on Ethereum. The project in just five days attracted $500 million, which was a record in this segment. At the same time, analysts reported on the risks of investing in Blast.

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