Dharma
Pitched as the Robinhood of DeFi, it was shut a month after OpenSea bought it
A San Francisco startup that began as a protocol for crypto lending and became a mobile smart-contract wallet letting US users move money from bank accounts into DeFi.
- Capital raised (announced)
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | 2019 |
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nadav Hollander | Unknown – Jan 2022 | Handed OpenSea's CTO role to Chris Maddern in July 2025; no later role established | Oct 2026 | |
| Brendan Forster | Unknown – Jan 2022 | Software engineer at Coinbase | Oct 2026 |
Timeline
2017
22 May 2018
An open protocol and developer tools for issuing tokenized loans, with no native token, launched alongside a borrowing and lending app.
5 February 2019
The margin-lending product for traders was in closed alpha. The company planned to grow its engineering and growth teams.
18 January 2022
How it ended
Acquired
When OpenSea announced it was acquiring Dharma Labs, the company said its app would close after a 30-day sunset. Swaps and purchases were switched off, users were asked to move or sell their tokens with network fees paid by the company, and funds left behind stayed reachable through an open-source app on IPFS at the user's own gas cost. The company said it did not want to force the app into OpenSea's product line.
What happened next
- Acquisition18 January 2022
The team joined OpenSea to work on making NFTs easier to buy, sell and mint. The price was not disclosed; coverage at the time repeated an earlier Axios report that it could be between $110 million and $130 million.
Still alive
Open spot
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Sources
10 sources behind this page.
- 1Opensea Acquires Dharma Labs, Co-Founder Is Named New CTO · Bitcoin.com News · Jan 2022
- 2Dharma Labs Raises $7 Million From Green Visor, Coinbase and Polychain · CoinDesk · Feb 2019
- 3NFT Marketplace OpenSea Acquires DeFi Wallet Firm Dharma Labs · CoinDesk · Jan 2022
- 4OpenSea Acquires Rally as It Continues to Pivot to Token Trading · CoinDesk (syndicated on Yahoo Finance) · Jul 2025
- 5Dharma to Shut in 30 Days as OpenSea Buys Company · CoinMarketCap Academy
- 6Blockchain Lending Firm Dharma Raises $7 Million From Coinbase Ventures, Others · Cointelegraph · Feb 2019
- 7OpenSea acquires DeFi onramp wallet Dharma Labs · CryptoSlate · Jan 2022
- 8Launch HN: Dharma (YC S17) an open protocol for borrowing/lending cryptoassets · Hacker News (post by the founder) · May 2018
- 9LinkedIn profile: Brendan Forster - Software engineer at Coinbase — previously Strategy @ OpenSea, co-founder & COO @ Dharma, Operations @ Uber | LinkedIn · LinkedIn, as shown in Brave Search API results (self-published profile) · user-editable
- 10X search: @Dharma_HQ posts mentioning "Brendan" · twitterapi.io (X data provider)
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.