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SuperRare NFT Marketplace Lays Off 30% of Staff: Here’s Why
John Crain, CEO of NFT marketplace SuperRare, announced yesterday, January 6, that the company has laid off 30% of its employees. The decision came amid the protracted crypto winter the crypto and NFT industry has been struggling with lately. On Twitter, Crain shared a screenshot of a Slack message to his staff, detailing the reasons for the “tough news”. Let’s take a closer look at why SuperRare cut staff.
Why did SuperRare lay off 30% of its staff?
On Friday, SuperRare Labs CEO John Crain announced that the company had to “part ways” with about 30% of its employees. He noted that SuperRare Labs “overhired” to compensate for growth during the NFT market’s previous bull run.
“Startups are a balancing act of managing rapid growth while making every effort to conserve limited resources,” Crain wrote. “During the last bull run, we grew in line with the market. In recent months, it has become clear that this aggressive growth was unsustainable: we overstaffed and take full ownership of this mistake.”
“In order to correct course, we have taken the difficult decision to size our team,” he added. “…ensuring 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-species in the world.”
What is the SuperRare NFT Marketplace?
SuperRare is an exclusive crypto-art marketplace that allows users to sell and collect digital artwork. The marketplace was launched in 2018 and caters exclusively to NFT art. In other words, it is the marketplace for everything from conceptual art to illustrations and NFT photography. Based on the Ethereum blockchain, it features only the most talented and popular upcoming artists.
In March 2021, SuperRare raised $9 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Velvet Sea Ventures and 1confirmation, with participation from celebrities such as Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff and Ashton Kutcher.
What other Web3 companies have cut staff?
Unfortunately, the SuperRare NFT marketplace is not the first Web3 company to lay off his employees – and it probably won’t be the last. Back in June 2022, for example, crypto exchange Coinbase cut its workforce by around 18%. At the time, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong noted that the company “grew too fast” in the bull market. In the midst of a looming recession, the company decided to lay off 1,100 employees.
Later, in July, top NFT marketplace Open sea cut around 20% of the workforce due to “crypto winter and broad macroeconomic instability”. According to CEO Devin Finzer, the company had to prepare “for the possibility of a prolonged downturn.” Nevertheless, the CEO was hopeful that the drastic measure would put OpenSea in a position to “become the biggest market on the planet.”
Companies such as Gemini, Crypto.com and Meta have also cut their workforces. In fact, Meta let go of over 11,000 employees (about 13% of its workforce) across its Apps and Reality Labs segments.
