OpenSea Lays Off 20% of Staff, Citing Crypto WinterIssuing time:2022-07-15 15:00
“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. Each of the people leaving has played a critical role in OpenSea’s journey. They’ve supported our users, championed our mission, and worked intensely to build the foundations of the N FT space. They are talented and committed and they will be missed – and we plan to treat them with great care. For those leaving us, we’ll be providing generous severance, healthcare coverage into 2023, and accelerated equity vesting for those who haven’t hit their cliff. We’ll also be helping with job placement and opening our personal networks to support them however we can.”
Finzer went on to say, “…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… During this winter, I expect that we’ll see an explosion in innovation and utility across NFTs… Winter is our time to build.” The folks leaving us are smart, hardworking, mission-driven individuals who’ve played an immeasurable role in growing OpenSea and the NFT space to where we are today. We will miss them and they will forever be part of our story and community.
OpenSea and Other Dramas In addition to the staff cuts, OpenSea already had some problems within the company. The platform suffered a hack at the beginning of the year when PeckShield reported that they had 700 thousand dollars in ETH stolen from the platform. In other dramas, in May, a scam was announced from the official OpenSea Twitter account. This scam was based on a fake ad saying that OpenSea and YouTube had teamed up to bring out a new NFT collection. A link supposedly offered a place on the waiting list for these NFTs. However, it was just a phishing scam. On July 1, an employee of Customer.io, Opensea’s email delivery partner, accessed the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace database. They leaked the emails of customers and newsletter subscribers to an unauthorized outside party. Customers were warned that the incident could result in an “increased likelihood of email phishing attacks.” Any customer who had given their email address to the company in the past were told to assume they were affected by the leak.
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Finzer cited the crypto winter as the driving force behind the decision. He said the decision was necessary “to be in a solid position.” He is convinced that the bear market will bring a lot of “innovation to the ecosystem.”