OpenSea acquires Dharma Labs and a new CTO

The NFT marketplace buys the nearly five-year-old DeFi protocol but does not share financial terms.

OpenSea announced Tuesday the acquisition of Dharma Labs, a cryptocurrency lending platform and digital wallet, for an undisclosed amount. According to the statement, Dharma Labs would effectively shut down and its co-founders, Nadav Hollander and Brendan Forster, will become OpenSea’s new chief technology officer and its head of strategy, respectively.

OpenSea claimed this acquisition will help accomplish its mission to scale product development, grow its team, expand its safety and reliability efforts and invest in the nonfungible token (NFT) and Web3 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

Devin Finzer, OpenSea’s co-founder and CEO, believes 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 added that the two companies 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.”

As OpenSea’s new chief technology officer, Hollander is expected to use his expertise to improve their products’ technical reliability and uptime, as well as to build Web3-native mechanisms that reward loyal community members.

Related: OpenSea surpasses $3.5B in monthly Ether trading volume, setting new ATH

According to a statement from Dharma Labs, its Dharma Smart Wallet will be deactivated in 30 days. It thus urges its users to withdraw or sell their funds before Feb. 18, 2022 and clarifies that they will not have to pay any fees to do so.

Additionally, OpenSea recently announced the creation of a private NFT Security Group that will steer investment efforts and tackle security and safety challenges that face the NFT and Web3 ecosystem. Co-founder and current chief technology officer, Alex Atallah, will assume the role of overseeing the group’s development.