OpenSea Lays Off Roughly 20% of Its Staff

CEO Devin Finzer cited an “unprecedented combination of crypto winter and broad macroeconomic instability.”

AccessTimeIconJul 14, 2022 at 7:16 p.m. UTC
Updated May 11, 2023 at 5:42 p.m. UTC
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NFT (non-fungible token) marketplace OpenSea has laid off about 20% of its staff, CEO Devin Finzer announced in a tweet on Thursday.

  • “The reality is that we have entered an unprecedented combination of crypto winter and broad macroeconomic instability, and we need to prepare the company for the possibility of a prolonged downturn,” Finzer wrote in a note to staff.
  • Finzer said the layoffs put the company in position to weather up to five years of depressed conditions at OpenSea’s current volume and not have to have further layoffs.
  • “With the hard (but important) changes we made today, we’re in an even better position to capture what will soon become the largest market on the planet,” Finzer added.
  • OpenSea joins a number of crypto firms, many of them exchanges, that have laid off staff or paused hiring in recent months. Gemini, Coinbase, Crypto.com and Bullish.com have all announced layoffs recently.

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Nelson Wang

Nelson Wang was CoinDesk's news editor for the East Coast. He holds BTC and ETH above CoinDesk's disclosure threshold of $1,000.


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