Famous NFT marketplace OpenSea has announced a major wave of redundancies as part of its corporate restructuring. Half of the company’s employees are affected by this measure
OpenSea lays off half of its employees
With a view to far-reaching restructuring, non-fungible token (NTF) platform OpenSea is laying off 50% of its workforce. This decision is directly in line with the company’s V2 project, as detailed by Devin Finzer, OpenSea’s CEO and co-founder, in a thread on X.
While the number of people affected was not revealed, the 50% statistic was confirmed by a company spokesperson to our Decrypt colleagues, the company preferring however to shed light on the future benefits of these “organizational changes”:
“Today, we’re making significant organizational and operational changes as we focus on creating a more agile, and ultimately better, version of OpenSea. Thanks to these changes, we’re better positioned to deliver to the community and lead high-impact efforts tailored to the speed at which this space is evolving. “
Nevertheless, it was clarified that employees impacted by these redundancy measures would benefit from several advantages. They would receive 4 months’ salary and 6 months’ care, including mental health benefits. In addition, the timetable for them to acquire shares in the company has reportedly been brought forward.
Make way for OpenSea V2
This restructuring is a direct consequence of the way OpenSea has been redesigned to face up to the increasingly intense competition from other platforms on the market.
In fact, Devin Finzer made it clear that the choice of people involved was not based on their skills, and that others “would be lucky to recruit them” :
7/9
This is the most difficult part of this change. These folks played a key role in getting us to this point and I’m incredibly thankful for their contributions.Their departure is not a reflection on the people we’re parting ways with today. Others would be lucky to hire them.
– Devin Finzer (dfinzer.eth) (@dfinzer) November 3, 2023
While the company’s CEO talks of new features to come in terms of technology, speed and user experience, no concrete information has yet been revealed as to what form this metamorphosis will take. Nevertheless, he indicates that OpenSea has taken note of the criticism it has received:
“But we’ve also heard your feedback loud and clear: sometimes OpenSea feels like a follower, not a leader. And that’s not what we want to be. We want to act with speed, quality and conviction to make more meaningful bets. “
Although the general trend in the NFT market is downward this year, OpenSea seems to be particularly suffering from this drop in interest. In particular, this loss of momentum is characterized by $91.46 million in volumes in October on Ethereum (ETH), where its competitor Blur achieved $181.55, out of a total of $308.4 million, according to data from The Block.
As part of the community calls for the launch of a token, it remains to be seen whether OpenSea will yield to this pressure or not, and whether this hypothetical token would have any real utility beyond the purely mercantile aspect.
