World’s largest NFT marketplace OpenSea to lay off 20% of its workforce as NFT sales plunged to $700M from $5 billion in Jan.

OpenSea, the world’s largest non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace announced Thursday it is cutting about 20% of its workforce to reduce costs amid a prolonged slump in crypto-asset markets. The announcement comes just two months after the NFT marketplace was hit by a phishing attack with at least 32 users losing about $2 million worth of NFTs.

In a statement on Twitter, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer said: “Today is a hard day for OpenSea, as we’re letting go of ~20% of our team. Here’s the note I shared with our team earlier this morning:”

“@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,” Finzer’s message read, according to a screenshot Finzer tweeted shortly after.

Finzer goes on to say: “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).”

Today is a hard day for OpenSea, as we’re letting go of ~20% of our team. Here’s the note I shared with our team earlier this morning: pic.twitter.com/E5k6gIegH7

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

With today’s announcement, OpenSea now joins a list of tech companies that have announced layoffs or planned to freeze hiring due to the ongoing economic downturn. At least 50 tech companies have either laid off their employees or plan to do so in the near future as fear of inflation and the economic recession continues to spread around the globe.

According to Reuters, OpenSea’s NFT sales volume on the Ethereum blockchain network fell in June to $700 million, down from $2.6 billion in May and a far cry from January’s peak of nearly $5 billion.

As of July 7, there have been at least 20,000 employees laid off in mass job cuts in the U.S. tech sector so far this year, according to data layoff tracking data from CrunchBase. More tech companies are also planning to trim their workforces to counter market challenges amid the global economic downturn.