NFT Marketplace OpenSea lays off 20% of the workforce

by James · July 14, 2022

Co-founder and CEO of the popular OpenSea Non-Fungible Token (NFT) Marketplace, Devin Finzer, announced a reduction in the company’s workforce. The platform will release 20% of its employees to adapt to the current downturn in the crypto industry.

Related reading | Snapchat to test features to let users view NFTs

The manager shared a letter sent to OpenSea employees. There, the company promised to provide its former employees with a “generous severance package” and health services for the remainder of 2022 and 2023.

OpenSea claims it will provide its former employees with equity earnings for “those who have not hit their cliff”. The company also promised to help its former employees relocate to another company, “open our personal networks to support them as best we can”. Finzer wrote the following about the people who will be fired from the company:

The people who are leaving us are smart, hard-working, mission-driven people who have played an immense role in expanding OpenSea and the NFT area to where we are today. We will miss them and they will forever be a part of our history and community.

Finzer claims that OpenSea was designed with “the cyclicity of the crypt in mind”, and therefore he believes that the company will be able to cope despite the bearish trend across the crypto market. The need to reduce the workforce was driven not only by this “cyclical” nature of industry, but also by current macroeconomic conditions.

The director claimed that the measure will allow the platform to survive as much as 5 years if the “crypto winter” is extended. Finzer added:

(…) The reality is that we have entered into a unique combination of crypto winter and broad macroeconomic instability, and we must prepare the company for the possibility of a prolonged downturn (…).

OpenSea joins the contraction of the encryption sector

As Bitcoinist has reported over the past two months, the cryptocurrency market has declined with other risk takers. The price of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other major cryptocurrencies have recorded over 70% losses from their all-time highs.

This has led to crypto-independent companies cutting back on the workforce. In addition to OpenSea, the popular crypto exchange Coinbase, exchange Crypto.com, the crypto lending company BlockFi and others have taken similar actions.

An OpenSea spokesman told Fortune Magazine that the bearish trend in the sector has been triggered by macroeconomic factors and global turmoil. The company’s representative expects that this trend will expand and continue to negatively affect the industry and its sub-sectors.

Data from the cryptanalysis company Nansen registers a decline in activity for the NFT sector as the price of Ethereum goes down. As shown below, the trading volume for the NFT sector has experienced a sustained decline in activity with June as a major exception.