OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace, announced that it will lay off 20% of its staff. This is not a surprise. Cryptocurrencies, the main driver of value for NFT speculators, are trading 50%-70% below their all-time highs, and NFT trading volume on OpenSea has tumbled as well.
OpenSea is a decentralized marketplace that allows users to buy and sell non-fungible tokens. Founded in 2017, the NFT exchange initially began as a market for CryptoKitties but has expanded beyond collectibles.
OpenSea and NFTs both continuously evolve. This recent downsizing is just a step in the evolution of this marketplace.
What should OpenSea transform into? Should it be a marketplace of professional sellers? A pure auction site? Have some e-commerce functions? Should there be guarantees of quality or authenticity or other “central authority” kinds of protections for buyers? The decentralization goals of the Web3 purists adds additional layers of complexity to these questions.
For now, the company will resize, rein in costs, and weather the crypto winter. Ultimately, however, OpenSea will have to match its service offerings to the continuously evolving behaviors of NFT buyers and sellers – and that’s way easier to say than to do.
Tara Thompson and Rob Longwell, editors
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