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 of a message to SuperRare’s Slack channel announcing the 30% discount, stating that they had “tough news to share.”
“Startups are 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 oversaw $663,000 worth of trading volume over the past 30 days, compared to OpenSea’s $307 million and Magic Eden’s $80.1 million 30-day trading volume.
This is due in part to the SuperRare models focusing more on the art, artist community and single edition NFT artwork than the computer generated avatar models that contain thousands of tokens in a single collection, which is popular in OpenSea and Magic Eden. .
related: The industry is looking for a solution to the NFT image hosting disaster
Moving forward, Crain’s emphasized 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 laying off staff during the crypto season, with Cointelegraph reporting at least six companies have done so since early December 2022.
In terms of the latest company to cut headcount, it was reported on January 5 that crypto lender Genesis was laying off 30% of its staff, while crypto exchange Huobi also announced a 20% cut on January 6.
A report from The Wall Street Journal this week also shows that the US bank Silvergate has cut 40% of its staff as a result of the $8.1 billion bank run that was triggered in response to the collapse of FTX in November.