@channel We’re Laying Off 20% Of You, Says OpenSea CEO

On Thursday Devin Finzer, CEO and co-founder of NFT marketplace Opensea @’d everyone in a particular internal Slack channel to tell them he was laying off 20 percent of the company’s workforce.

Finzer said we have entered a "crypto winter,” in which cryptocurrency exchanges have laid off workers and the value of currencies and NFTs has crashed.

“@channel Hi all, we made an incredibly sad and difficult decision to reduce the size of our team by ~20%, and today we’re saying goodbye to many of our friends and team members across OpenSea,” the message read, according to a screenshot Finzer tweeted shortly after. 

Finzer goes on to say that “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 then points, again, to the looming crypto winter, and says the changes put the company in a position to maintain enough funds “under various crypto winter scenarios (5 years at the current volume).

“I am so grateful to all those leaving OpenSea today, for their contributions and the time they spent with us on this journey. They have played an immeasurable role in, and will always be part of, the OpenSea story and community,” Finzer wrote. He added that those laid off will receive “generous” severance, healthcare coverage into the new year, and “accelerated equity vesting for those who haven’t hit their cliff.”

OpenSea is the most popular NFT marketplace. It has been a hotbed of scams and hacks, with countless people having their NFTs hijacked or laundered through the marketplace. The sales of NFTs have plummeted over the last few weeks, Bloomberg recently reported.

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