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ArtNews | Shanti Escalante-De Mattei | Jul 14, 2022
Devin Finzer, the CEO of OpenSea, announced Thursday on Twitter that the NFT marketplace laying off 20 percent of its employees.
We made the incredibly sad and difficult decision to reduce the size of our team. Today we are going to say goodbye to many of our friends and team members across OpenSea. The changes we’re making today put us in a position to maintain multiple years of runway under various crypto winter scenarios (5 years at current volume) and give us high confidence that we’ll only have to go through this process once.
Prior to the layoff, OpenSea had around 275 employees. After the layoff of just over 40 employees, they remain with 230.
See: ‘Fearless Girl’ creator sells NFTs to cover $3M legal fees
In January, OpenSea announced a valuation of $13 billion following a successful round of series C funding totaling $300 million. At that time, the company was operating with 90 employees. After the funding came in, Finzer said at the time that he planned to use the money to “grow the team” of customer service employees from 60 to 120, to help quality of responses to customer support requests from their users. The marketplace has been plagued with technical difficulties and plagiarism complaints, along with a steady drip of hacks and scams, which has led to legal trouble.
Finzer, and co-founder Alex Atallah were recently named NFT’s first billionares, each valued at $2.2 billion, according to Forbes.
Read: NFT Marketplace exploit leads to catastrophic losses for some collectors
Some of the trouble users faced came from internal issues. A former OpenSea employee, Nate Chastain, was arrested in early June in connection with an alleged insider trading scheme while at the marketplace, a first. A decision to limit the amount of NFTs one could create in a day temporarily caused mayhem on the site before executives backtracked their decision and Iranian OpenSea users were unceremoniously kicked off the platform after the company said it had to comply with US sanctions against Iran.
Continue to the full article –> here
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