NFT Marketplace Opensea Lays Off 20% of its Staff

Today, co-founder and CEO of NFT marketplace giant Opensea, Devin Finzer, announced that the company would be laying off roughly 20% of its current workforce.

The news comes only a few months after OpenSea received an additional $300 million in funding, putting its valuation at a whopping 13.3 billion dollars.

Finzer wrote in a note shared with employees on Discord, then with the world on Twitter: “For those leaving us, we’ll be providing generous severance, healthcare coverage into 2023, and accelerated equity vesting for those who haven’t hit their cliff. We’ll also be helping with job placement and opening our personal networks to support them however we can.”

Critiques on Twitter are noting the already small team and daily revenue as reasons to expand, but Devin wrote, “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 will only have to go through this process once.”

Are we in a 5-year crypto winter, or have we bottomed? That seems to be the trillion-dollar question. What are your thoughts?