<ul><li>OpenSea, an online marketplace for crypto collectibles and NFTs, announced the acquisition of Dharma Labs, a digital cryptocurrency wallet. The announcement follows reported talks between the two companies, to make an acquisition priced at USD 110–130 million, during OpenSea’s Series C funding round earlier this month.</ul> 

• The acquisition decision was driven by OpenSea’s four core priorities for 2022, namely, to 1) accelerate product development, 2) improve OpenSea’s trust, safety, and reliability, 3) invest in the NFT, and web3 ecosystem, and 4) expand headcount. As part of the deal, OpenSea plans to shut down Dharma Labs’ app within a month, and Dharma Labs’ co-founder Nadav Hollander will join OpenSea as its new chief technology officer (CTO) with an initial mandate to improve the technical reliability and uptime of OpenSea products and to build Web3-native mechanisms to engage with and reward early users of the platform.

• OpenSea’s co-founder and current CTO, Alex Atallah, will move to a new, external-facing role to oversee the company’s NFT and web3 ecosystem development efforts, as well as serve as OpenSea’s representative of the recently announced NFT Security Group, a community-driven group focused on promoting cross-platform safety.

• Founded in 2017, Dharma Labs is a digital cryptocurrency wallet built on the Ethereum blockchain, which also allowed users to borrow and lend cryptocurrencies on a non-custodial peer-to-peer basis.