OpenSea is in the news this week once again for the wrong reasons. While last week it disclosed a data leak that exposed user email addresses, this week the company is preparing to let go of a sizeable portion of its staff.
This according to CEO Devin Finzer, who took to Twitter to share the news by posting a Slack screenshot of a message sent to employees earlier that day.
Said tweet confirmed that roughly 20 percent of its workforce was being let go, with the NFT marketplace seemingly needing to make some tough decisions after the past few months.
Finzer noted in his Slack message that the sizeable lay offs are being made to ensure that OpenSea has enough runway to continue to operate for the next few years, should more difficult periods occur in the cryptocurrency space.
“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 the current volume), and give us high confidence that we only have to go through this process once,” he explained.
Today is a hard day for OpenSea, as we’re letting go of ~20% of our team. Here’s the note I shared with our team earlier this morning: pic.twitter.com/E5k6gIegH7
— Devin Finzer (dfinzer.eth) (@dfinzer) July 14, 2022
Finzer did not disclose precisely how many employees are being laid off, but as TechCrunch noted by simply looking at the company’s LinkedIn page, there are 769 people work for the NFT marketplace. This means that as many as 150 people are departing the company following this decision.
OpenSea is not alone in making some recent cuts to its workforce, with Coinbase doing the same last month and citing a similar crypto winter as the reason why. The Verge reported last month too that Block Fi and Crypto.com have also let go of large amounts of respective staff.
It also looks like many a bubble is bursting in the crypto space, with lending platform Celsius Network filing for bankruptcy this week as well.
What this means for the future of NFTs is unclear for now, but the fact that one of the largest marketplaces for the medium is downsizing, does not bode well.
