According to a Friday LinkedIn update, OpenSea CFO Brian Roberts has departed the NFT marketplace startup less than a year after he arrived.
According to his LinkedIn update, Roberts, the former CFO of ride-sharing giant Lyft, joined OpenSea in December as the company’s first finance employee and established the finance team from the bottom up. He will continue to serve as a consultant for the organisation.
Roberts’ exit coincides with a mass exodus from the crypto business. In recent weeks, many executives have departed crypto businesses. The Block revealed earlier this week that FTX’s head of OTC and institutional sales, Jonathan Cheesman, had discreetly departed the company. Last month, FTX.US president Brett Harrison reverted to a consulting position. In the same month, Jesse Powell resigned as CEO of Kraken to make room for David Ripley. Robert Gutmann, the CEO of the Bitcoin investment services business NYDIG, and Yan Zhao, the president, both departed the company last week.
Diverse motives may underlie the changes, but they are always precipitated by challenging market circumstances. From its all-time high of roughly $69,000 in November 2017 to its current price of around $19,500, Bitcoin’s price has decreased by more than 70%.
In recent months, NFT trading volumes have also decreased significantly. The trade volume on Ethereum-based NFT platforms decreased by around 18% to $504 million last month, according to statistics from The Block Research.
The traffic on OpenSea, the biggest NFT platform, decreased by more than 30 percent last month. Roberts said in his LinkedIn update that he was “very optimistic about web3 and OpenSea in particular.” He said, “I tell you that the best is yet to come as the organisation is now focused on expansion.”
OpenSea is supported by prominent investors, such as Paradigm and Coatue. The business secured $300 million in Series C capital earlier this year at a value of $13.3 billion. OpenSea purchased crypto wallet company Dharma Labs shortly after the funding round, and also acquired NFT aggregator Gem in April of this year.
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