Biggest NFT provider OpenSea fires 50% personnel

If you listened to the Joe Rogan podcast with Elon Musk this week, you heard two men who are both very bullish on crypto, whilst being very bearish on NFTs. Bitcoin fans appreciated it. They think that all the attention to projects like DeFi, yield farming and NFTs is simply a distraction for Bitcoin, which should attain a new all-time-high before we can focus on sidetracks again.

Now, after the largest marketplace for ‘Non Fungible Tokens’, the company OpenSea, laid off some 50% of its staff, it seems to us that the bottom for NFTs has been reached.

It remains to be seen whether the NFT hype will restart if the price for Bitcoin goes higher.

69 million dollar

The NFT market pretty much peaked in 2021, when the price of Bitcoin reached its all-time high and terms like “yield farming” and “Beeple” were being typed in search-boxes. The market had grown from $82 million in 2020 to $17 billion in 2021. OpenSea, a marketplace for NFTs based on eBay, experienced it’s golden era.

The New York digital artist Beeple became world famous and sold an NFT for 69 million dollars through Christie’s auction house, something that previously only classical artists like Monet and Van Gogh seemed to be able to do with real paintings.

Celebrities also ventured into purchasing it and the collection of the ‘Bored Ape Yacht’ club became a must-have for Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg.

Even former American president Trump, not really a fan of Bitcoin and crypto, saw an opportunity and launched his own collection. It did surprisingly well thanks to his large fan base.

Scandals

When the price of Bitcoin plunged in 2022, interest in NFTs also waned and the first scandals began to surface. Several of the OpenSea’s executives had enriched themselves in 2021 by purchasing NFTs from a particular collection before they were featured on the front page of the website. After the collections were shown, the value of their initial purchase increased hundreds of percent, after which they sold at the peak, a real ‘pump and dump’ operation.

COOKED.@opensea went from a 13 billion dollar valuation in 2022 to a 3 billion dollar valuation by mid 2023.

Tiger Global invested $300 million in their series C in 2022.

How on earth are they on a second round of layoffs a year later?

Something is very fishy. pic.twitter.com/PRZ1Asfny1

— PAULY (@Pauly0x) November 3, 2023

Now we seem to have reached the bottom. OpenSea realizes that the market was saturated and decided a few days ago to lay off 50% of its staff. This is already the second round of layoffs at the company, the first came in July 2022.

There is already a lot of speculation about some kind of ‘relaunch’ of the site, a version 2.0 if you will. We don’t know at the moment whether that will work, but it will certainly be interesting.