Yesterday CNBC reported that Salesforce is planning an NFT Cloud, citing un-named sources. The topic was discussed at an online Salesforce event. There was some debate about whether Salesforce will be a competitor to OpenSea, the NFT marketplace, or whether it might partner with the startup. Below we have other relevant information about that.
Salesforce’s co-CEO Marc Benioff bought Time Magazine in late 2018, and last year Time was pretty active with non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
During the Singapore Fintech Festival in November, Benioff talked about Time’s NFT activities. Asked about the most exciting things in blockchain, Benioff responded, “Another business that we made a very small investment in from Time Ventures is OpenSea. And when you look at kind of the eBay of NFTs, I think they have got this figured out. They have a lot of transactions on OpenSea, and the CEO there is this gentleman named Devin (Finzer), and he’s amazing,” said Benioff. “His vision is incredible.”
He spoke about how Time is using OpenSea API’s to connect to Time’s platform to help manage NFTs.
With these comments, perhaps it’s more likely that the Salesforce NFT Cloud might be a collaboration with OpenSea. But you never know.
At the start of the year, OpenSea announced a $300 million funding round at a $13 billion valuation. The site emerged as the dominant consumer marketplace in 2021. However, in 2022 a new competitor LooksRare, appears to be a challenger. However, because LooksRare offers token incentives, a huge proportion of transactions are wash trades executed to receive LooksRare tokens. Nonetheless, its model has attracted a lot of traffic, and LooksRare can’t yet be written off.
In terms of other blockchain activities, Salesforce Blockchain was launched in 2019 using Hyperledger Sawtooth. Since then, the company has invested Digital Asset, the creator of the DAML smart contract language that supports many blockchain flavors.
