Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace SuperRare has announced a 30% cut in staff members as CEO John Crain explained that the company made the wrong hire during the last bull market.
In a January 7 tweet, Crain’s together image from a message to SuperRare’s Slack channel announcing the 30% discount, stating that they have “tough news to share.”
“Starting is a balancing act to manage rapid growth while doing everything to conserve limited resources. During the recent bull run, we are in tandem with the market,” he noted, adding:
“In the last few months, it has become clear that this aggressive growth is not sustainable: we have hired, and I take full ownership of this mistake.”
I have some hard news to share: pic.twitter.com/iLDKqgyhQa
— SuperRare John (@SuperRareJohn) January 6, 2023
Crain’s did not elaborate specifically on the redundancy package the laid-off employees will receive, but noted that the company will “do everything we can to help them transition to new opportunities and support their future endeavors.”
SuperRare is one of the biggest names in the space, but it mainly sees lower trading volumes than competing NFT markets such as OpenSea and Magic Eden.
according to data from DappRadar, SuperRare monitored $663,000 in trading volume over the past 30 days, compared to OpenSea’s 30-day trading volume of $307 million and Magic Eden’s $80.1 million.
This is partly because SuperRare models are focus more on arta community of artists and single-edition NFT artwork as opposed to computer-generated avatar models containing thousands of tokens in a single collection, popular in OpenSea and Magic Eden.
related: The industry is looking for a solution to the NFT image hosting disaster
Moving forward, Crain’s stressed that despite slow growth during the crypto bear market, SuperRare is still focused on continuing with its initial vision of opening up more access and exposure to digital artists.
“We are facing headwinds, yes – but there are still incredible uncaptured opportunities when we continue to build something completely new: a global digital art renaissance that is transparent, fair and that anyone can access from anywhere in the world,” he concluded.
SuperRare’s massive staff cuts add to the wave of blockchain and crypto companies that own it lay off staff during the crypto seasonwith Cointelegraph reporting on at least six companies it happens from the beginning of December 2022 only.
In terms of the latest company to reduce the number of heads, reported on January 5 that Genesis crypto lender Dismissal of 30% of its staff, when the news is a problem Huobi crypto exchange also announced a 20% discount on January 6th.
A report from The Wall Street Journal this week also shows that US bank Silvergate is cutting 40% of its staff as a result of $8.1 billion open the bank which was triggered in response to the FTX collapse in November.
