Crypto hiring: Rough waters for OpenSea as NFT platform announces layoffs

Around 50% of staff were cut. Also, Lido loses a business developer and DCG hires a defense lawyer for its impending legal battle

article-image

Diego Thomazini/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share

OpenSea’s CEO announced a series of layoffs on Friday afternoon via a thread on Twitter, as the NFT market continues to underwhelm.

https://twitter.com/dfinzer/status/1720516605933756514?s=20

An OpenSea spokesperson told Blockworks around 50% of staff was affected. The move comes less than a month after fellow NFT startup Yuga Labs made its own round of employee cuts.

OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer also said the platform is “shifting to a smaller team with a direct connection to users.” 

The company was valued at $13.3 billion at the height of its fundraising efforts back in 2022. This was before the NFT market entered a prolonged slump, and its loss of market share to rival NFT platform Blur.

Finzer mentioned the platform will be making a “big upgrade” to OpenSea 2.0, though specifics on the update are scarce.

“With these changes, we are better positioned to deliver for the community, shipping high-impact efforts and matching the speed at which this space evolves,” a spokesperson for OpenSea said.

Other notable hiring news

  • Kraken hired Bivu Das as the exchange’s UK managing director. Das previously spent seven years at Deloitte before founding a Web3 infrastructure firm in 2022.
  • Seraphim Czecker left from an amorphous business development role at Lido, writing, “it’s hard to make a significant growth impact when the project is so successful already.”
  • DCG retained defense lawyer Barry Berke after New York Attorney General Letitia James sued the firm for allegedly defrauding customers. Berke was the chief impeachment counsel in former US President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial.

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Research Report Templates.png

Research

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) represent low-hanging fruit in a massive market ripe for Web3-driven disruption. The global CDN market was valued at ~$28B in 2024, and is projected to surpass $140B by 2034, (18.75% CAGR) underscoring the immense demand for efficient content delivery.

article-image

TAPEDRIVE says it can make Solana data storage 1,400x cheaper

article-image

Immigration changes are papering over a fragile labor market

article-image

BlueYard’s head of crypto research developed FreePay to make fee-free, tap-to-pay crypto payments a reality

article-image

Buzzwords include: succinct universal proofs, zkVM, incrementally verifiable computation, distributed supercomputer and agentic AI

article-image

US dollars might technically be worth less, but it’s still good news

article-image

Apps are doing well, as is casino gaming, says Tom Schmidt of Dragonfly