Magic Eden NFT Marketplace Slashes Work Force by 15 Percent: Details

Magic Eden has announced layoffs from its team, days after vouching that its business has grown significantly in the last fifteen months. Citing ‘corporate restructuring’ as the reason, the Solana-based NFT marketplace laid off 22 staff members. With this announcement, Magic Eden has joined the list of several other crypto firms that in recent days resorted to slashing their work forces owing to the volatile market sentiment that is leaning more towards losses than profits.

This year, the NFT marketplace says it aims to develop new use cases like rewards and social experiences, for which it felt the need to remove certain existing designations and replace them with others.

“Our focus areas for 2023 include growing traction across chains and developing services for NFT creators. As we established these priorities for the year, we had to take a hard look at what structure and roles are needed,” Jack Lu, the co-founder and CEO of Magic Eden, wrote in an official blog post.

The severed employees have been offered a compensation which includes salaries worth two months, healthcare for the next six months, placement assistance, as well as the company laptops that these workers were using.

“The company remains strongly capitalised with a long runway even in today’s bear market,” Lu added.

The sales volume of Solana NFTs have been down since last year.

The sales of Solana NFTs stood at $91.52 million (roughly Rs. 730 crore) in June last year. It was down by 64 percent from $261.07 million (roughly Rs. 2,100 crore) that was recorded in May 2022.

In fact, OpenSea, which is Magic Eden’s more established rival in the NFT marketplace space, also recorded a plunge in sales volumes.

According to crypto analytics community Dune data, OpenSea’s trading volume saw a steady decline throughout the first two quarters of the year.

This year, however, brought some recovery to the NFT market with sales having gone up by 16 percent around January this year.