OpenSea Lays Off Roughly 20% of Its Staff

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

Jul 14, 2022 at 7:16 p.m. UTC

Updated Jul 14, 2022 at 8:15 p.m. UTC

OpenSea is preparing for the possibility of an extended crypto downturn. (OpenSea/CoinDesk, modified PhotoMosh and BeFunky)

Nelson Wang

Nelson Wang is 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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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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