JayZ, Shawn Mendes Fund “Unblocked” Raises $10 Million at $90M Valuation

The world of NFTs continues to grow with the involvement of big celebrity names and equally big blockchains.

One such NFT platform aims to become more than just a medium of buying and selling and for the same reason it describes itself as an NFT consultant over an NFT marketplace.

Unblocked Unboxed

The company aims to act as a consultancy in the sense that it aims at creating a platform where a brand or a celebrity will be able to not only create and distribute their NFTs, a second established marketplace would also allow for traders to trade them.

Recently, the company raised a $10 million seed round at a $90 million valuation, the investment for which was led by Tiger Global.

Founder and CEO Harrison Wang said to Forbes:

“I think when people think NFT’s, it’s just daunting for them. So that’s why we’ve been calling them ‘digital collectibles.’ It’s also why we rebranded.”

In line with their mission, the company a while ago released a set of digital collectibles for the hip-hop group Cypress Group.

While the company does create a lucrative offer to draw in big money from big wallets and celebrities, it still stands in competition with the likes of OpenSea who already have a major dominance in this industry.

Although over the last few months the craze of NFTs did come down, it was reinvigorated this month as with the sale of 2.1 million NFTs, the total volume traded on the Ethereum chain crossed $4.2 billion.

However, the same was not the case with Polygon as despite the sale of 2.3 million NFTs the total volume remained under $70 million.

Problems With OpenSea

Although OpenSea does have dominance in this space, the recent issues surrounding the marketplace might actually create an opportunity for its competitors to rise. Just this week, users lost more than $1 million worth of NFTs due to a front-end bug that got worse when Opensea themselves suggested a solution to fix it. 

Thus unless these recurring issues are solved for good, OpenSea might remain vulnerable to losing its customers.