In recent times, when the market has improved, we see that the recovery performance of OpenSea NFT Marketplace is still relatively weak, especially compared to other competitors such as Blur. In addition, the serious decline in revenue forced OpenSea to lay off 50% of its staff. In this article, let’s join Weakhand to learn about the current situation and see if the golden age of OpenSea NFT Marketplace has ended.
Before jumping into the article, everyone can refer to some of the following articles to understand better.
- What is OpenSea? OpenSea cryptocurrency overview
- OpenSea Studio: A new beginning or a series of mistakes
- OpenSea regulates license fees & Controversy from the community
Layoff 50% of Personnel and Plan to Launch OpenSea 2.0
On November 3, 2023, OpenSea – one of the leading NFT Marketplace platforms announced the layoff of 50% of its staff. This news immediately became a hot topic of discussion across NFT communities. Many opinions believe that this dismissal decision is actually a clear sign that OpenSea’s operations are seriously deteriorating, but there are also some opinions that this is just a personnel purging activity. by OpenSea.
Co-founder of OpenSea Devin Finzer also announced on social network X (Twitter) that the layoffs were to kick off the OpenSea 2.0 launch plan. Devin Finzer also added that having a smaller team makes it easier to connect with each other and therefore works better.
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OpenSea is making some big changes today to focus on the next version of our product.— Devin Finzer (dfinzer.eth) (@dfinzer) November 3, 2023
Although it is not known what the exact situation of OpenSea NFT Marketplace is at the present time, in recent times, although the NFT market has prospered, OpenSea’s recovery speed is still far behind its great rival. they are Blur. From the beginning of the year until now, the transaction volume on Blur has surpassed OpenSea for 9 consecutive months. This shows that Blur is growing very fast and OpenSea seems to be being left behind. Therefore, the root cause of this layoff decision may originate from the company’s own problems, not just the implementation of new plans.
Reviewing the Development History of OpenSea NFT Markeplace: From Champion to Losing the Throne to Blur
The story begins in December 2017 when OpenSea was introduced to the community by two co-founders, Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah. At that time, NFTs were still a relatively unknown field to most users. However, with the belief that NFTs are a digital asset and will definitely bring value to creators and collectors.
With great confidence, OpenSea continues to upgrade and improve its products to support more Blockchain and NFTs. By 2021, when the NFT market exploded, OpenSea became the leading NFT trading market with trading volume accounting for more than 80% of the entire market. For the whole year of 2021, it is estimated that the huge revenue source that OpenSea can earn is up to 365M USD and become one of the projects with the highest revenue in 2021. By January 2022, OpenSea announced to call raised 300M USD, bringing the total company valuation to 13.3B USD. Occupying the number 1 position on all data showed that OpenSea seemed to have no worthy competitors at the time.
Statistics on trading volume on the NFT market
However, with a potential NFT market and witnessing the huge revenue stream that OpenSea has created, this is certainly an attractive destination for all projects and promises to have an attractive competition in the future. hybrid.
OpenSea started to receive the first competitors such as gem, X2Y2, LooksRare,… However, looking back, we only see two competitors that are truly worthy of OpenSea. One was Gem, which was later acquired by OpenSea and renamed OpenSea Pro. The second is Blur – which has succeeded in improving the core problem that the NFT market faces, which is lack of liquidity through Airdrop measures and encouraging users to List and bid.
Right from the moment of launch, Blur has shown a complete difference from most other NFT Marketplaces (which I see are all imitations of OpenSea) on the market. From being an Aggregator platform to UI/UX to the customer base, everything is completely different and of course this breakthrough has brought great success to Blur. Today, Blur holds nearly 70% market share in terms of transaction volume while OpenSea is far behind with only 23% market share. This huge gap reflects OpenSea’s loss in competition with Blur.
OpenSea Is Having Big Trouble With Human Resources
OpenSea’s large-scale layoffs have clearly revealed the company’s serious problems in managing its human resources. 2021 saw OpenSea’s trading volume grow dramatically and the company made significant profits from it.
To expand its business model, OpenSea recruited a large number of professional managers, but the problem here is that OpenSea expanded too quickly. The number of employees in the company increased rapidly in just a short time to more than 1,000 people, making the organizational structure extremely complicated and this has caused efficiency to gradually decrease.
OpenSea has recruited a large number of senior executives and each executive has many middle managers and each middle manager has a large number of employees. This three- to four-level management structure is not only redundant but also makes information transmission complicated and ineffective. As the market entered a bearish phase, problems from overexpansion began to appear, causing OpenSea’s performance to plummet.
In the end, they were forced to fire half of their employees, which was almost an inevitable consequence of mistakes in human resource management. OpenSea needs to learn profound experience in this issue. OpenSea needs to review its human resources management structure and take appropriate measures to avoid similar problems in the future.
Will OpenSea 2.0 Bring OpenSea Out of Recession?
At this time, despite losing in transaction volume compared to Blur, there is a bright spot: OpenSea is still the platform attracting the largest number of trading users in the NFT market. At the moment, OpenSea has about 6,000 daily active users and 30,000 weekly active users, which is still more than double that of rival Blur. What is possible is the foundation for OpenSea to reverse the situation in the future.
Daily active user salaries on OpenSea still dominate the market
The short-term launch of OpenSea 2.0 cannot reverse the current situation. In this highly competitive field, the ability to innovate and adapt to the market is extremely important. OpenSea needs to reassess its strategy, improve its services, attract more users, and stay competitive to ensure its position in the NFT market is not threatened. This story is also a reminder that in the world of digital assets, continuous efforts are needed to stay competitive even when the platform has a large user base.
summary
OpenSea is entering its worst period since its golden age in 2021. The layoff of 50% of staff and the launch plan of OpenSea 2.0 cannot revive OpenSea in a short time. Therefore, OpenSea needs a step-by-step development strategy to hopefully return to its golden age.
