Before OpenSea there was WifiCoin, and it went nowhere.
Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah had designed a token for sharing wi-fi, a way to pay for time on a stranger's router. They pitched it to Y Combinator. Then CryptoKitties, a game of collectible cats on Ethereum, gave them a different idea, and the wi-fi plan was dropped. They founded OpenSea in December 2017.
Forbes put Finzer's stake at $2.2 billion, and he and Atallah were called the first NFT billionaires.
It was not Finzer's first small bet. Born in 1990, he grew up around the San Francisco Bay Area, the son of a physician and a software engineer, and went to Miramonte High School in Orinda. In his junior year at Brown he and Dylan Field, later the founder of Figma, built CourseKick, a search tool for course registration. Reportedly one in five undergraduates had signed up within two weeks. He graduated in 2013 with a degree in computer science and mathematics, interned at the Wikimedia Foundation, Google Cloud and Flipboard, worked at Pinterest, and co-founded Claimdog, a personal finance app that Credit Karma bought.
Y Combinator took the new idea in 2018. Money came slowly, then all at once: $2.1 million in November 2019, $23 million from a16z in March 2021, and $100 million that July at a $1.5 billion valuation. In January 2022 Paradigm and Coatue put in $300 million at $13.3 billion. Forbes put Finzer's stake at $2.2 billion, and he and Atallah were called the first NFT billionaires.
Then came the price. In May 2022 the site handled about $2.7 billion in a single day. By the end of August the daily figure was $9.34 million, a fall of 99%. A phishing attack hit users in February, a vendor breach exposed 1.8 million email addresses in June, and in July the company laid off about 20% of its staff. Its head of product, Nate Chastain, was convicted in 2023 over insider trading and sentenced to three months; an appeals court overturned the conviction in July 2025. By April 2023 Forbes estimated Finzer's wealth at under $600 million. In August 2024 the SEC sent a Wells notice over platform tokens, and dropped the matter in February 2025.
What kept the company alive was a change of shape. OS2 now supports tokens on 22 blockchains, and in the two weeks after its October 2025 release it handled $1.6 billion in crypto trades. The idea of becoming a trading app came, Finzer has said, from his wife, Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo, whom he met in 2021 and calls a silent cofounder of OpenSea 2.0. In October 2025 he said a SEA token would arrive in the first quarter of 2026; we could not confirm that it did. The last priced round is still the one from January 2022.
The quiet lesson is in the order of things. The wi-fi token failed, the collectible-cat detour became a company, and the best idea for the second act came from the person closest to him, not the market.