NFT Marketplace OpenSea Lays Off 20% of Its Staff

NFT marketplace OpenSea announced today that it's laying off around 20% of the company's employees. TechCrunch reports: "... [T]he 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," OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer said in a message shared with staff that he posted publicly on Twitter as well. The company did not specify exactly how many employees were impacted by the decision, but the company's LinkedIn page indicates the company has around 750+ employees currently. Finzer says that impacted employees will be receiving severance and health insurance "into 2023" as well as accelerated equity vesting. The layoffs raise questions about the company's aggressive growth tactics and how they approached the sustainability of the NFT sector's breakneck growth. In his note to staff, Finzer says the company has years of runway ahead of it with these changes, assuming things don't get even bleaker. "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," Finzer writes, later adding, "Winter is our time to build."

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