OpenSea NFT Marketplace reduced staff by 50%

Popular NFT marketplace startup OpenSea has laid off half its staff, the company has confirmed. Decrypt on friday.

A representative of the company told him roughly that decryption. 50% of employees are affected in the company. The company would not disclose the number of people affected by the move.

“Today, we're making significant organizational and operational changes as we focus on building a sleeker—and ultimately better—version of OpenSea,” the spokesperson said. – Correlating impact efforts and the pace at which this area is evolving.

Devin Finzer, co-founder and CEO of OpenSea, made the announcement in a Twitter thread, detailing how the company has streamlined its team in its efforts to introduce the next-generation marketplace.

“We heard your feedback loud and clear: sometimes OpenSea feels like a follower, not a leader. And that's not who we want to be,” Finzer wrote. We want to move with speed, quality and confidence to make more meaningful bets.

“Today, we're reorienting the team around ‘OpenSea 2.0,' a major upgrade to our product — including the underlying technology, reliability, speed, quality, [and] Experience,” added Finzer.

The spokesperson added that OpenSea will take a prudent corporate approach going forward. Workers affected by the layoffs will be offered four months of severance pay, six months of health care and mental health services, and an accelerated vesting schedule.

OpenSea was the largest marketplace during the NFT market boom of 2021 and 2022, during which time it accumulated billions of dollars in monthly trades for artwork, profile pictures and other commodities.

The startup parlayed that success into massive funding, eventually Raising 300 million dollars For the Serie C round in January 2022 at a price of $13.3 billion. That funding was led by Paradigm and Koatu.

However, the NFT market has started losing steam in mid-2022 along with falling cryptocurrency prices. When rival marketplaces began refusing creator royalties—or a small fee taken from secondary marketplace sales returned to the project creator—OpenSea moved late last year to do the same.

OpenSea chose not to change its royalty policy at the time, following strong pushback from creators, but eventually said it would stop enforcing mandatory royalty payments for most NFT sales this summer, starting Aug. 31.

At that point, in terms of NFT trading, given the blurring of token-based trading incentives, OpenSea had already fallen behind the marketplace blur, even though OpenSea boasted the most traders of any marketplace.

According to data from Dune, OpenSea had more than 32,000 unique wallets last week between the regular and pro marketplaces, more than double the amount of Blur. But Blur last week commanded more than $51 million in sales, about 70% of the total NFT sales market share.

OpenSea has already laid off about 20 percent of its workforce in July 2022, with Finzer citing an “unprecedented combination of crypto winter and broader macroeconomic uncertainty” ahead of a “long recession.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated after publication with additional details.