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The management of Opensea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces in the world is laying off approximately 20% of its employees. According to the tweet by the marketplace’s co-founder, it is a needed move to keep Opensea afloat and prepare it to come out stronger of the crypto winter we find ourselves in.
Opensea is one of many companies in the crypto world that is shedding extra skin. And based on the recent failures of Celsius, Coinbase, Three Arrows Capital and a few other big names, Opensea may not be the last one to go through such critical restructuring.
The state of the NFT market
Just last week, Tencent announced that is it shutting down its NFT marketplace. The company ran two different NFT marketplaces and they are all soon to be gone. This is not necessarily tied to lack of market inactivity, although it is hard to say that sales were great, but the not-so-appreciative take of the government when it comes to non-fungible tokens and more specifically crypto.
It is hard not to see that the NFT market is not affected by the so-called crypto winter. It is one of the reasons behind the Opensea layoffs, as per the founder’s comments. Still, the marketplace has not been having the best of times lately, with employees being sued for insider trading, Bored Ape NFT hacks, and leaks of users’ emails. Although it must be said that the latter was not caused by the NFT marketplace’s management team.
Many key to the industry NFTs have gone down in price lately. Some, have managed to retain most of their values, which once again highlights that the NFT market has its own Bitcoin and Ethereum. Will the market crash? No, it won’t, but it cannot be denied that most industry leaders are affected by the general dip in stocks, crypto, and atrocious geopolitical factors caused by you know who.
The future of NFTs and Opensea
With the increased introduction of new NFT marketplaces by the world’s most renowned crypto exchanges, we see continuity in adoption. Kraken, Binance, Gate and many others now have their own NFT marketplaces, which for the average consumer means that search queries like where to buy NFT and how to buy NFT will soon be gone forever.
The future of the industry lies in finding new utility cases for NFTs. Big brands like Adidas and Prada, make a good example of it even though by a great extent, this is most likely done and governed by the brands’ marketing departments. Car manufacturers like Alfa Romeo and Bentley, also jump in to the space, each finding real utility use cases for the technology. With this in mind, we are certain that Opensea is not a gone player, and will remain to play an important role in the industry.
