Why a ‘Mobile-First’ Mentality Drove OpenSea’s Latest Acquisition

Outstanding NFT market OpenSea introduced Tuesday that it acquired cellular token buying and selling and portfolio administration app Rally (previously Ground) in an effort to construct “the on-chain every thing app.”

As a part of the acquisition, Rally co-founders Chris Maddern and Christine Corridor—the latter the previous COO at Robinhood Crypto—will be part of OpenSea’s govt crew, with Maddern taking the position of chief expertise officer and Corridor turning into OpenSea’s chief of workers. Particulars of the deal weren’t disclosed.

OpenSea commanded a lot of the buying and selling quantity through the explosive NFT buying and selling growth of 2021 and 2022. Whereas NFT demand has plunged since then, OpenSea is enterprise a full transformation this yr, unveiling its OS2 platform full with fungible token buying and selling and saying help for an upcoming SEA token that may come from the OpenSea Basis.

“OpenSea as we speak has lots of of hundreds of energetic NFT merchants with linked wallets who belief OpenSea as their portal to Web3.” Maddern advised Decrypt. “All through 2025, we’ll develop our relationship with these customers to broaden the varieties of actions they do on OpenSea.”

Maddern added that token buying and selling has been “by far our fastest-growing exercise.” With its newest acquisition, the platform seems prime to broaden even additional with a specific concentrate on the cellular expertise. 

“We’re reimagining cellular from the bottom as much as create a product that brings tokens and NFTs collectively in a magical manner—a single dwelling for on-chain crypto in your cellphone,” Corridor advised Decrypt. “We count on that whereas our quantity will develop extra rapidly on desktop, cellular will massively outpace desktop for client development.”



As a part of its efforts to create an every thing app for crypto customers, Maddern highlighted a number of pre-requisites the corporate might want to tackle past cellular, together with making decentralized finance (DeFi) and perps easy and accessible, together with embracing AI. 

“Customers are searching for a single, easy place to have the ability to uncover and interact with on-chain property—OpenSea will likely be that place,” stated Maddern. “The way forward for Web3 will likely be mobile-first, as a result of that’s how folks work together with every thing else of their digital lives.”

Rally started as an NFT portfolio app, permitting customers to maintain observe of their NFT efficiency by way of a local cellular app. As Ground, the agency raised $8 million in June 2022 and ultimately rebranded to Rally in September 2024, because it had expanded into extra on-chain actions like meme coin buying and selling and efficiency. 

For the foreseeable future, Maddern stated that customers can use the Rally app as they sometimes would, with a migration path to the reimagined OpenSea cellular expertise coming later this yr.

OpenSea first launched its unique cellular app again in 2021 through the peak of the NFT buying and selling frenzy. The platform has as soon as extra claimed the lead in Ethereum NFT buying and selling market share, capturing greater than 50% within the final 3 months in response to knowledge from Tiexo. OpenSea had beforehand misplaced market share lately to buzzy rivals like Blur and Magic Eden.

In February, OpenSea co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer stated that the SEC can be ending its investigation into {the marketplace}, which centered on the potential classification of NFTs as securities. That transfer added to a string of dropped investigations and lawsuits since Donald Trump took workplace.