OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, will cut 20% of its employees, Devin Finser, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said in a letter to the team.

Today is a tough day for OpenSea as we have left ~20% of our team. Here is the note I shared with our team this morning: pic.twitter.com/E5k6gIegH7

— Devin Finzer (dfinzer.eth) (@dfinzer) 14 July 2022

He attributed the mass layoffs to an “unprecedented combination of crypto winter and widespread macroeconomic volatility”.

“We need to prepare the company for a possible long downturn,” Finser said.

According to him, the changes will allow the platform to continue to operate “at current trading volumes for up to five years” under various adverse scenarios.

“The layoffs reflect the dire state of the crypto market, whose total value has fallen by more than two-thirds from last year’s peak. The shutdown of OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace, is a clear indication that no company is immune from the pressures of the so-called crypto winter,” Finser added.

Previous cuts have already been announced by a number of crypto industry participants, including Gemini, Coinbase, Crypto.com, BlockFi, BitMEX, Bitpanda, and Compass Mining.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance exchange, by contrast, described the crypto winter as a good time to hire new employees. Plans to recruit more than three hundred experts were announced by KuCoin chairman Johnny Liu.

Recall that in June Forbes included OpenSea in its list of the most innovative private companies in financial technology in 2022.

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