OpenSea Buys DeFi Wallet Startup Dharma Labs In NFT Adoption Push

NFT marketplace OpenSea has acquired crypto wallet startup Dharma Labs, the company said in a blog post Tuesday. Dharma Labs co-founder Nadav Hollander will become OpenSea's chief technology officer as part of the deal aimed at speeding up the adoption of NFTs and Web3.

The announcement comes weeks after Axios reported that OpenSea was in talks to buy the startup for $110–130 million. The actual deal price was not revealed.

OpenSea will shut down Dharma's app which hosts its Ethereum wallet that allowed users to connect their bank accounts, and buy and swap tokens while engaging with other elements of the DeFi ecosystem. Dharma's wallet's users will get only a month to offload assets from the wallet to a different account, which Techcrunch said could be "controversial."

The NFT marketplace's co-founder and current CTO Alex Atallah will serve as its representative for the recently announced NFT Security Group and will steer the soon-to-be-announced community investment efforts.

"Our teams 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," OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer wrote in the blog post.

Finzer hoped that the union will be a "force multiplier for NFTs and web3 adoption" and help improve the experience of buying, selling and minting NFTs on OpenSea.

OpenSea has set a new record with its monthly trade volume in Ether exceeding $3.5 billion. As per data from Dune Analytics, the NFT marketplace surpassed its all-time high of $3.42 billion set in August last year.