Non-fungible token (NFT) exchange SuperRare has announced a 30% cut in staff members, as CEO John Crain explained that the firm mistakenly overhired during the last bull market.
In a January 7 tweet, Crain shared a screenshot of his message to SuperRare's Slack channel announcing the 30% cut, stating that he had "some tough news to share".
โStartups are a balancing act of managing rapid growth while doing everything possible to conserve limited resources. During the recent bull run, we grew along with the market,โ he noted, adding that:
"In recent months it has become clear that this aggressive growth was unsustainable: we overhired and I fully own this mistake."
I have some difficult news to share: pic.twitter.com/iLDKqgyhQa
โ SuperRare John (@SuperRareJohn) January 6, 2023
Crain did not specifically describe what type of redundancy packages the laid off employees will receive, but noted that the company "will do everything possible to help them transition to new opportunities and support them in future endeavors."
SuperRare is one of the biggest names in the space, but notably sees significantly lower trade volume than competing NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea and Magic Eden.
According to data From DappRadar, SuperRare oversaw $663,000 in trading volume over the past 30 days, compared to OpenSea's $307 million 30-day trading volume and Magic Eden's $80.1 million.
This is partly due to the SuperRare model which is more focused on artthe community of artists and single-edition NFT artwork, unlike the computer-generated avatar model with thousands of tokens in a single collection, which is popular on OpenSea and Magic Eden.
Related: Industry Seeks Solutions to NFT Image Hosting Disasters
Moving forward, Crain noted that despite a growth slowdown during the cryptocurrency bear market, SuperRare is still focused on moving forward with its initial vision of opening up greater access and exposure to digital artists.
โWe are facing headwinds, yes, but an incredible untapped opportunity remains as we continue to build something entirely new: a global digital art renaissance that is transparent, fair, and accessible to anyone from anywhere in the world.โ concluded.
SuperRare's sharp downsizing adds to a wave of blockchain and crypto companies having shedding staff during the crypto winterwith Cointelegraph reporting on at least six companies doing it only from the beginning of December 2022.
As for the most recent companies to reduce the number of employees, on January 5 it was reported that Genesis crypto lender laid off 30% of its staff, while the allegedly troublesome Huobi crypto exchange it also announced a 20% cut on January 6.
A report in The Wall Street Journal this week also indicated that US bank Silvergate cut 40% of its staff as a result of a Bank run of $8.1 billion which was triggered in response to the FTX crash in November.
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