Magic Eden NFT Marketplace Slashes Work Force Citing ‘Corporate Restructuring’ as Reason

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

Written by Radhika Parashar, Edited by Richa Sharma | Updated: 14 February 2023 16:54 IST

Magic Eden NFT Marketplace Slashes Work Force Citing ‘Corporate Restructuring’ as Reason

Photo Credit: Magic Eden

The NFT market, which had fallen in 2022, is beginning to show recovery

Highlights

Magic Eden plans to introduce newer products and services this year
It said these layoffs were decided in the direction of its upcoming plans
NFT sales grew by 16 percent around January this year

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.

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2/ We are deeply grateful to these folks. Each of them has contributed immensely to Magic Eden over the last year. We will be honoring them & their contributions with the utmost care and respect. We were able to speak w/ each person 1:1 before sharing this news publicly.
— Jack Lu (@0xLeoInRio) February 14, 2023

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.

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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.

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Further reading: Cryptocurrency, Magic Eden, NFT, Layoffs

Radhika Parashar

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Radhika Parashar is a senior correspondent for Gadgets 360. She has been reporting on tech and telecom for the last three years now and will be focussing on writing about all things crypto. Besides this, she is a major sitcom nerd and often replies in Chandler Bing and Michael Scott references. For tips or queries you could reach out to her at RadhikaP@ndtv.com. More