"We grew along with the market during the recent bull run. In the past few months, it has become clear that SuperRare's rapid growth was not sustainable. "We over-hired, and I take full responsibility for this mistake," CEO and co-founder John Crain said in a statement posted on social media. "To get back on track, we had to make the hard decision to downsize our team. This will make sure that SuperRare Labs can continue to serve our community of artists, collectors, and curators and remain the place to find the best cryptoart in the world." 20 people will lose their jobs because of the change.
The news comes after six months in which SuperRare and other NFT platforms changed their ways of doing things by offering new perks to try to get more people to invest and trade. One change SuperRare made was to offer PFP NFTs, which are large collections of avatars that are made by a computer program (like the Bored Ape Yacht Club or CryptoPunks). Before, SuperRare's main goal was to put out a small number of unique digital artworks. SuperRare also started selling RarePass, which is an NFT that can be used as a key to a subscription service that gives the holder one NFT by a popular artist every month. The company said that the first 250 RarePasses were all sold for a total of $4.5 million. But this hasn't been enough for the company to make as much money as it did during the boom market.
Every month in 2021, SuperRare made between $10 million and $30 million in sales. Then, in 2022, sales dropped into the single digit millions and then into the hundreds of thousands, according to data from Dune Analytics. Due to the crypto winter, SuperRare isn't the only NFT platform that has shrunk. In July, OpenSea said that it would be laying off 20 percent of its 275 employees. The move worried people in the NFT community because it showed that the top leaders did not see a quick rebalancing of the market coming up. Just six months before they told people they were being laid off, OpenSea was worth $13 billion, and Forbes called its founders, Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah, the first NFT billionaires.
Selena Mattei