- Recent departures include OpenSea’s former COO and a celebrated developer.
- The SEC is investigating the NFT marketplace.
- NFT trading volume has cratered in the last two years.
Four key senior executives and a top developer at OpenSea, the beleaguered NFT marketplace, have left the company since February, according to social media posts on LinkedIn and X.
Recent departures include Shiva Rajaraman, the former COO, and Jeremy Fine, former head of business and corporate development. Justin Jow, former vice president of finance, left in the winter.
Rajaraman, Jow, and Fine were part of OpenSea’s leadership team, or the group of executives who report directly to Devin Finzer, co-founder and CEO of the startup, according to company documents.
The three former executives have moved on to Uber, Scale AI, and OpenAI, respectively.
Karen Kreuzkamp, OpenSea’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 “0age,” one of OpenSea’s key engineers, recently announced that he jumped ship to Uniswap Labs.
“He’s an amazing protocol developer,” a former employee told DL News, in reference to 0age, who is pseudonymous.
Exec exodus
The recent exodus of executives follows a round of departures last November. OpenSea’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 of its staff that month.
Now, the only members with more than a yearlong tenure on OpenSea’s leadership team beyond Finzer are Nadav Hollander, the CTO; and Lorens Huculak, co-head of OpenSea Pro, the marketplace’s 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 departures come as the company faces a moribund NFT market, intense competition from other NFT marketplaces, and regulatory scrutiny.
Total NFT sales reached $304 million in August, an almost 95% decline from the market’s height in January 2022, according to CryptoSlam.
Meanwhile, competitors like Blur and Magic Eden have eaten into OpenSea’s share of the shrinking market. Once the go-to locale to buy and sell NFTs, OpenSea ranks only fourth in 30-day trading volume, according to 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 communication from the SEC that an entity is subject to potential litigation.
The agency was probing whether NFTs on its platform were unregistered securities, Finzer said.
“We’re shocked the SEC would make such a sweeping move against creators and artists,” he wrote on X. “But we’re ready to stand up and fight.”
On the heels of the Wells notice announcement, OpenSea users lodged a lawsuit against the NFT marketplace in September.
The plaintiffs are represented by Adam Moskowitz, a lawyer behind some of the largest class-action lawsuits in crypto.
“Conjuring from thin air a purported class action lawsuit based on our disclosure of an SEC Wells notice won’t make the allegations in the complaint true,” an OpenSea spokesperson previously said in a statement to DL News.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that Justin Jow left OpenSea in the last three months. He departed the company in February.
Ben Weiss is DL News’ Dubai Correspondent. Got a tip? Email at bweiss@dlnews.com.
