Hello world. I’m Stevey, the new head of community at OpenSea. I’ll be joining a really talented team of builders at OpenSea to drive the evolution of our current community efforts. 

OpenSea recognizes the responsibility we have to help shape and expand the NFT industry, and that we have a large community of creators and supporters who are relying on us to do our part.

We also recognize that we’ve had a lot of room for improvement in our community efforts to date -- we see this as a moment in time for OpenSea to turn the page and begin a new chapter, showing all of web3 our deep commitment to the wider ecosystem.

In that vein, I want to share a bit more about our goals in our community building efforts, as well as the lens we will use for decision making.

OpenSea’s mission is to build the most inclusive and trusted NFT marketplace with the best selection. 

For our community, that means empowering and educating a diverse set of creators, collectors, and enthusiasts on the promise and potential of NFTs. 

We will create spaces where we can learn from and with our community about how to use NFTs as a means of creating new economies, and identify ways OpenSea can foster innovation to push the NFT industry forward.

This will include initiatives like our freshly-minted Ecosystem Grants program, sponsoring bounties & hack-a-thons, and funding other organizations who are propelling the wider NFT and web3 ecosystem.

We also plan to create channels across many different platforms to offer dedicated OpenSea community support staff and give our community members and customers the chance to communicate directly with OpenSea team members. Our hope is that we can generate meaningful feedback, address support related items, and create spaces for ideas or suggestions to be shared with us, both within our own channels and through external channels.

We’ll expand the experiences that take place in our Discord, we’ll be engaging in other creator & collector Discord servers, and we’ll try to be present in many different forums our community naturally hangs out at. 

We plan to offer additional educational resources so that our community can learn how to best navigate OpenSea, the wider NFT universe, and all of web3 in a trusted and safe manner.

There’s a slew of other items we will be doing that I could continue to write about. Instead, I will announce updates directly on different initiatives as they’re launched rather than speak in the abstract about what will be, and let our actions speak for themselves.

My hope from this message is to share the lens we are looking through as we decide upon our community initiatives, and to share our ethos so that our community can hold us accountable. We want to build in the open -- with the community, and for the community.

I’ve been community building in different forms for the past 10+ years, both digitally and IRL. In those years I learned many lessons, but few more valuable than these: community is built through dialogue and discourse, through both challenging and empowering conversations, through experimenting and iterating, through showing up and listening.

NFTs are having a powerful moment and are quickly changing the dynamic of the creator economy. OpenSea is committed to broadening and enhancing the NFT ecosystem, and to being a driving force in empowering creators and collectors while driving NFT adoption, regardless of platform. 

If you’d like to contribute to this mission, our team is hiring, and we’re looking to expand our community team across many different verticals– go to opensea.io/careers to learn more. 

All of us at OpenSea look forward to building with you and for you.

Onward and upward to Chapter 2. 

S