Dapper Labs lays off 51 employees

Dapper Labs chief Roham Garegozlou announced the layoff of 51 ‘a brilliant colleague and friend’ — the third downsizing at the NFT company in under a year.

“The decision was incredibly hard due to the remarkable people it touched, but it had to be done to ensure stability and efficiency at Dapper Labs,” he wrote in an internal memo.

According to Growjo, the reductions affected about 12% of the staff.

In November 2022, media reported that Dapper Labs laid off around 22% of staff, or about 130 employees. Three months later, the company said goodbye to another 20% of workers.

Garegozlou noted that his company and the Flow blockchain remain well capitalised. In his view, the restructuring will focus on users and foster the “healthy development of the community”.

“Flow is also funded by a separate pool of capital, so the team has money set aside for several years ahead without the need to sell tokens to finance short-term operations,” added the CEO of Dapper Labs.

The layoffs come amid a global downturn in the non-fungible token market. According to the Dune dashboard from SeaLaunch, NFT trading volumes on leading marketplaces, including OpenSea, LooksRare and Blur, have continued to decline since the FTX crash. There has also been an outflow of unique users on most marketplaces.

According to Nansen, the total royalties earned by NFT creators on resales have fallen to a two-year low — around 1000 ETH.

Over the past year, employment in the cryptocurrency sector has fallen by 10% — from 210,000 to 190,000 workers.

Earlier layoffs were announced by Robinhood, Dapper Labs, Polygon, Magic Eden, Protocol Labs, Bittrex, Luno, Blockchain.com, Huobi, Bybit, STEPN, TrueLayer and others.