NFT platform SuperRare lays off 30 percent of employees – ARTnews.com

SuperRare, a leading NFT marketplace, has cut staff by 30 percent, citing efforts to straighten out its business strategy as the NFT bubble looks set to burst.

“During the last bull run, we grew in line with the market. Over the past few months, it has become clear that this aggressive growth was unsustainable: we overstaffed, and I take full ownership of this mistake,” wrote SuperRare CEO and co-founder John Crain in one statement posted on social media. “To course-correct, we’ve made the difficult decision to size our team, to ensure that SuperRare Labs will be able to continue to serve our community of artists, collectors and curators while remaining the destination for the best crypto in the world.”

The move means 20 people will be let go from SuperRare, a spokesperson confirmed ART news in an email.

The announcement follows six months in which SuperRare, as well as other NFT platforms, changed strategies, offering new benefits in hopes of luring new investments and trades. One of SuperRare’s shifts came in the form of offering PFP NFTs, large collections of procedurally generated avatars (à la Bored Ape Yacht Club or CryptoPunks). Previously, SuperRare had been focused on releasing a small amount of unique digital artwork.

SuperRare also began offering RarePass, an NFT that acts as a key to a subscription service that gives the holder one NFT a month, each of a different, popular artist. The company has said that the first 250 RarePasses sold out for a total of $4.5 million. Nevertheless, this has not been enough to maintain the level of profits the company saw in the boom market.

By 2021, SuperRare was consistently seeing $10 million to $30 million in sales per month. Then, in 2022, sales volume dropped to single-digit millions, and then to hundreds of thousands, according to data provided by Dune Analytics.

SuperRare isn’t the only NFT platform that has scaled back in response to the crypto winter. In July, OpenSea announced it was cutting 20 percent of its 275 employees. The move was a troubling sign in the NFT community that its top executives did not see a quick rebalancing of the market on the horizon. Just six months before the layoff announcement, OpenSea had been valued at $13 billion, and its founders, Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah, were named by Forbes as the first NFT billionaires as a result.