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OpenSea, the popular NFT marketplace, has decided to let go of half of its staff, according to co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer.



He mentioned that the company is working towards creating a new foundation for OpenSea 2.0, which led to laying off employees. Finzer also acknowledged the feedback received from users, stating that OpenSea has seemed like a follower at times, and that&#8217;s different from the kind of company they want to be.



The employees affected by this decision will receive four months of severance pay and other benefits. The new organization will have a flatter structure with fewer middle managers. This is the second time OpenSea is laying off staff this year, after firing 20% of its employees in July 2022 due to the &#8220;crypto winter.&#8221;



In August, OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, faced backlash from the community when it announced that it was discontinuing its operator filter feature. This feature allowed creators to blacklist marketplaces that did not enforce royalties.



Yuga Labs, the creator of popular NFT series like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, reacted by reducing its use of OpenSea&#8217;s Seaport marketplace smart contract. In a recent post, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer announced that the company is rebuilding and will continue supporting its existing products.



The upcoming OpenSea 2.0 will be tested iteratively in public. The company has 12 open positions and is offering starting salaries ranging from $90,000 to $270,000. During the 2021 and 2022 NFT market boom, OpenSea had a monthly trading volume of $2.8 billion.



However, the market started losing steam in mid-2022 as cryptocurrency prices fell. OpenSea considered removing creator royalties like other NFT marketplaces, but the move was met with protests from a large number of artists.

OpenSea

OpenSea Lays off 50% of Its Staff

The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York charged a Moroccan man with a remarkable digital assets robbery.



Moroccan national Soufiane Oulahyane managed to steal crypto and NFTs worth $450,000 after developing a deceptive replica of the OpenSea marketplace, according to CryptoPolitan. Oulahyane is accused of creating a fraudulent website, which was a replica of the original of OpenSea marketplace.



Oulahyane used paid advertisements to deceive his victims by offering their login credentials to him, which enabled him to gain unauthorized access to their accounts. Unsuspecting users, who are unaware of the trick, will log in to the fake OpenSea using their login credentials while they did not that they were giving sensitive information to Oulahyane’s controlled account.



It is believed that Oulahyane started his scheme in September 2021 and among the stolen assets was a Bored Ape NFT, previously purchased by the victim for an estimated value of 49 ETH.



Now, he faces charges of wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, unauthorized access device usage, and, a set of charges which could result in a long prison sentence if he is found guilty. It is worth noting that Oulahyane is currently in custody in Morocco, awaiting potential extradition to the United States to face trial.



A recent report found that half of the stolen NFTs are being sold within 160 minutes on different NFT marketplaces such as Blur and OpenSea.



PeckShield, a leading blockchain security company, issued a report on the stolen NFTs in June this year, clarifying the value stolen in the month, how long it takes for stolen NFTs to be sold, and which <a href="https://upyo.com/en/news/tags/nft-marketplace">NFT marketplaces</a> are used to sell the stolen assets.



In June, NFTs worth about $2.27 were stolen, with a decline of 23% compared to the previous month ($2.95 million). Half of the stolen NFTs were sold within 2.4 hrs on marketplaces like Blur and OpenSea.

OpenSea Marketplace

Moroccan Man Accused of Stealing NFTs, Crypto Worth $450,000

The NFT sales over the past week witnessed a decline compared to the week prior, as they went down by 31.66% at the time of writing.&nbsp;



Over the past seven days, the NFT sales amounted to more than $166.717 million, over $96.225 million of which were from the Ethereum blockchain, around 31.68% down from the previous week. Out of the top 20 blockchains, Ethereum had the lion’s share of the NFT sales seven days ago, accounting for around 57% of the total sales. 



While Bitcoin is still in second place in terms of NFT sales for weeks, accounting for around 17% of the total sales ($28.206 million), a 19.71% decline from the previous week. 



Most of the blockchains over the past week saw a decrease in sales except BNB Chain, Polygon, and Cardano. Blockchains of Solana, Polygon, BNB Chain, Immutable X, Mythos Chain, and Cardano followed Bitcoin regarding the total sales over the past week, respectively.&nbsp;



Most of the NFT collections witnessed a decrease in their sales, topped by Uncateogratized Ordinals and Azuki, which declined by more than 60%. While NFT collections of <a href="https://upyo.com/en/news/tags/bored-ape">Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)</a> and BRC-20 NFTs witnessed growth over the past week by 87.75% and 1.55%, respectively. 



Regarding the NFT price floor, Bored Ape Yacht Club is still in second place in terms of the highest floor value at $62,380 ETH, following CryptoPunks, whose floor was just $88,463 ETH, according to data from nftpricefloor.com.



The most expensive NFT sold last week was CryptoPunks #9476, which sold for more than $403,615 million. The following top expensive NFTs sold over the past seven days were sold from $371 million and downwards.&nbsp;



As for the NFT marketplaces, Blur leads the NFT marketplaces followed by <a href="https://upyo.com/en/news/tags/opensea">OpenSea</a>. Blur’s sales over the past week reached $107.61 million, while the sales on OpenSea were $38.76 million (-30.5%).

NFTs

BAYC NFT Sold As 2nd Most Expensive NFT over Past Week

Giant NFT marketplace OpenSea announced canceling trading fees on the digital collectibles temporarily in addition to two major changes to attract consumers.



OpenSea&#8217;s move came as a reactionary measure with the aim to gain more users after news showed that no-fee marketplace Blur surpassed Opensea in terms of daily Ethereum trading volume seeking a trading portion, <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/opensea-implements-0-fees-to-win-over-nft-userbase-lost-to-blur" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according to Cointelegraph</a>.



The other two changes included defaulting all collections without on-chain royalty enforcement to optional creator royalties starting at 0.5% in addition to adjusting its blocklist of other marketplaces that don&#8217;t honor full royalty payments to creators, allowing sales on NFT marketplaces with the same policies.



OpenSea confessed that its loss of users recently in favor of other NFT marketplaces is an attempt to restore its dominating control over the NFT space.



&#8220;Recent events – including Blur’s decision to roll back creator earnings (even on filtered collections) and the false choice they’re forcing creators to make between liquidity on Blur or OpenSea – prove that our attempts are not working,&#8221; Opensea said.



NFT community members lauded OpenSea moves, asserting the importance of competition among the marketplaces, however, they doubt that OpenSea would increase its platform fees in the future after restoring its migrating users.



Earlier in January, UPYO, the largest NFT marketplace in the Middle East, announced the cancellation of all fees imposed on trading, buying, and selling NFTs on its marketplace to encourage Arab NFT artists in the region to release more digital collectibles and those who are interested to join the Web 3.0 world.

OpenSea Cancels Fees to Restore Migrating Users to Blur

Opensea announced that it sold more than 1.3 million Polygon NFTs in December 2022, with transactions amounting to over $15.3 million from 116,000 active users, <a href="https://www.cryptonewsz.com/opensea-witnesses-sale-of-1-3-m-polygon-nfts-in-dec-2022/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CryptoNewsZ reported</a>.



Based on NFTs sold for each active trader, December was the third-highest month. Despite the high sales of Polygon on the world&#8217;s largest NFT marketplace, Opensea lost 23% of its dominance throughout 2022, in addition, the total number of NFT transfers during the year slipped by 25%.



The number of NFT transfers on Opensea hit 80,000 at the beginning of 2022, but the number continued to decline to reach 60,000 by December 31. The market share of Opensea was also significantly affected as it recorded 50% of the overall market share of NFTs by the start of 2022 and decreased to 33% by the end of the year.



However, traders expect that Opensea would come back in the coming few months in light of the growing popularity of Polygon NFTs.



In general, the value of global NFT sales plummeted by 76% year-over-year (YoY), recording $638.4 million in December 2022, according to CryptoPresales.com.



According to NFT collectibles data aggregator CryptoSlam, the value of NFT sales in December 2021 recorded $ 2.8 billion, a number that reflects the effect of the crypto bear market in 2022 on NFT sales. After recording a high level in January worth $4.77 billion, the NFT sales began to fall remarkably in the following months.



The NFT sales in October recorded a notable drop when they reached $460 million to recover again and hit $638.4 in December. According to data by Cryptoslam, the average sales value decreased to $144.9 in December 2022, compared to $384.4 in the same period in 2021, showing a 62% drop YoY.



Moreover, the NFT market witnessed a massive drop in the number of active wallets, which went down 80% in December in addition to a decline in the number of unique buyers and sellers.

polygon-opensea

Over 1.3 Million Polygon NFTs Sold on Opensea in December

The all-time sales of NFTs on the top five marketplaces exceeded the $40 billion mark since the beginning of the year, hitting about $41.3 by the end of October.



According to figures released by Dappradar, Opensea was the biggest NFT marketplace in the terms of sales, recording $32.78 billion, dominating almost 79% of the whole sales of the top five marketplaces.



<a href="https://news.bitcoin.com/the-top-5-nft-marketplaces-surpass-40-billion-in-all-time-sales/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bitcoin News</a> reported that Opensea&#8217;s sales were conducted by 2.35 million traders with an average price paid for an NFT of around $352.



Opensea was followed by the Axie Marketplace, whose volume of sales reached $4.26 billion. The average price paid for an NFT via Axie Marketplace is $171.32 as the marketplace saw 2.17 million traders.



CryptoPunks came in third place with all-time sales amounting to $2.96 billion settled by only 7,162 traders. While sales on Solana&#8217;s Magic Eden recorded $1.83 billion, making it in fourth place with an average price for an NFT of $124.09. However, it witnessed a high number of traders compared to CryptoPunks, reaching 1.214 million.



The fifth place was occupied by the NFT marketplace Looksrare as the volume of sales hit $1.62 billion. The average price paid for an NFT was $6.59K. Only 108,005 traders settled via Looksrare.



X2Y2 marketplace, for its part, is on its way toward the $1 billion milestone by achieving $895.1 million in terms of sales.



The global NFT sales in October recorded $428.8 million with a decline of 20.61% compared to September. October witnessed 4,366,220 NFT transactions among 510,859 buyers, <a href="https://cryptoslam.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according to Cryptoslam io platform</a>.

NFT Marketplaces

Sales of Top 5 NFT Marketplaces Surpass 40 Dollars Bln in October

OpenSea, the world&#8217;s first and biggest crypto collectibles and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), earned $144.5 million in the third quarter of 2022 in fees from users as most of the money goes to the creators, the Token Terminal platform said.&nbsp;



According to <a href="https://beincrypto.com/opeansea-recorded-144-5m-in-revenue-in-q3/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Beincrypto</a>, OpenSea&#8217;s profits reached only $35 million, which means 76% of the total fees go to the creators.&nbsp;



It is worth mentioning that OpenSea only collects fees worth 2.5% of the sale, while creators can set up to 10% as fees on a collection.



However, the overall sales on OpenSea, during this year, declined from $5.2 billion in January to about 349 million in September.&nbsp;



Beincrypto attributed the reasons for the decline to several factors, including the bear market, the macroeconomic conditions that affected the liquidity in the market, and the reducing interest in the NFTs.&nbsp;



The Volume of NFT Sales This Month&nbsp;



In September, the volume of NFT sales was $1.26 billion, with a decrease of 24.4% compared to August, according to Dune Analytics.&nbsp;



About 88% of the total NFT sales goes to Ethereum in September, a drop of 5% compared to 95% in August, while Solana hiked 6% in September to reach 10% of the total sales after it was only 4% in August.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">Overall USD volume in September was $1.26B, a 24.4% fall in comparison to August. &#8211; ETH NFT vol represented 88% of the total NFT vol, a decrease from 95% in Aug. &#8211; SOL NFT vol saw a 91% rise in comparison to Aug, now representing 10% of the total NFT vol (4% in Aug). <a href="https://t.co/IM0Nfil6xy">pic.twitter.com/IM0Nfil6xy</a>&mdash; NFTgators 🐊 (@NFTgators) <a href="https://twitter.com/NFTgators/status/1576509461644316672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 2, 2022</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



Moreover, the number of users went up 0.5% to record more than 569,000 in September. Ethereum users fell by 9.5% to reach 393,000, however, Solana users increased by 41%, amounting to 155,000, representing 27% of the total users in September, while they were 19% in August.&nbsp;



Beincrypto pointed to a strong start in October for the NFTs, indicating that NFT sales on Ethereum surpassed $10 million over the past 24 hours, with 18,895 transactions.&nbsp;



In addition, sales on Solana increased by 28%, recording $2.1 million in 24 hours.



It is worth noting that the volume of trade of NFTs went down around 97% since the beginning of 2022, according to figures released by&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://dune.com/thomas_m/NFT-stats" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dune Analytics</a>.&nbsp;



Dune&#8217;s figures showed a decline in the trading volume from $17 billion in January this year to $466 million in September, reflecting the loss of about $2 trillion in the market capitalization of the crypto market between November 2021 and July 2022.&nbsp;

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