Recent departures include OpenSea's former COO and lead developer. SEC Examining NFT Marketplace NFT trading volume has cratered over the past two years.
Four key senior executives and a top developer at embattled NFT marketplace OpenSea have left the company since February, according to social media posts on LinkedIn and X.
There are recent exits Siva RajaramanFormer COO, and Jeremy FineFormer Head of Business and Corporate Development. Justin JoeThe former vice president of finance, left in the winter.
Rajaraman, Joe and Fine are part of OpenC's leadership team, or a group of executives who report directly to Devin Finzer, the startup's co-founder and CEO, according to company documents.
The three former executives moved on to Uber, Scale AI and OpenAI respectively.
Karen KreuzkampOpenSea's top lawyer left in August for a position at Tools for Humanity, the company behind OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's crypto project WorldCoin.
And recently “0 Age” one of the key engineers of OpenC Announced He went to Uniswap Labs.
“He was an excellent protocol developer,” said one former employee News0Regarding age, who is nicknamed.
Exec Exodus
The recent exodus of executives follows a round of departures last November. OpenC's general counsel, vice president of operations, head of HR and head of communications each left the company shortly after the startup laid off more than half its staff that month.
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Now, the only members of OpenSea's leadership team beyond Finzer with more than a year of tenure are Nadav Hollander, CTO; and Lawrence Huculak, co-head of OpenSea Pro, a marketplace platform for experienced NFT traders.
None of the recently departed executives immediately responded to a request for comment, and OpenSea did not return a request for comment.
The exits come as the company faces a fragile NFT market, intense competition from other NFT marketplaces and regulatory scrutiny.
Total NFT sales reached $304 million in August, a nearly 95% decline from the market's peak in January 2022. Cryptoslam.
Meanwhile, competitors such as Blur and Magic Eden ate into OpenSea's share of the shrinking market. Once the go-to locale for buying and selling NFTs, OpenSea ranks fourth in 30-day trading volume. NFT Pulse.
Legal matters
To make matters worse, the company is facing an investigation from the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
In August, Finzer announced that his company had received a Wells Notice, or formal information from the SEC, that a firm was subject to potential litigation.
Finzer said the agency is investigating whether the NFTs on its platform are unregistered securities.
“We were surprised that the SEC would make such a big move against creators and artists,” he said wrote that In X. “But we are ready to stand and fight.”
Following the announcement of Wells' notice, OpenSea users sued the NFT market in September.
Adam Moskowitz, the attorney behind some of the biggest class-action lawsuits in crypto, represents the plaintiffs.
“Conjuring a class action lawsuit out of thin air based on our disclosure of the SEC Wells Notice does not make the allegations in the complaint true,” an OpenSea spokesperson previously said in a statement. News.
There is Ben Weiss News'Dubai Correspondent. Got a tip? Email at [email protected].
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