eBay's decision to axe 30 per cent of its web3 team — including a KnownOrigin co-founder — lays bare what happens when a cash-rich corporation gambles on hype instead of doing what it does best.
Reports emerged this week that eBay has cut roughly 30 per cent of its web3 and NFT team, including KnownOrigin co-founder David Moore, barely eighteen months after the e-commerce giant acquired the Manchester-based NFT marketplace. Stef Jay, who served as business and strategy officer for the web3 division, has also departed. Internal sources have pointed to a lack of leadership, unclear strategy, and serious questions about whether anyone steering the ship had the experience to do so.
An Acquisition That Never Added Up
eBay snapped up KnownOrigin in June 2022 for a rumoured $70 million according to sources close to the company, at a time when the NFT market was already showing signs of strain. Consider the fundamentals of what eBay actually bought: a platform that had facilitated approximately $7.8 million in lifetime trading volume. Not annual revenue. Not monthly volume. That was the entire transaction history of a marketplace founded in 2018. KnownOrigin had raised just $6.22 million in total funding, including a £3.5 million Series A round co-led by GBV and Sanctor Capital completed mere months before the acquisition.
If that figure is anywhere close to accurate, the numbers make it almost impossible to construct a valuation that would justify a serious corporate acquisition. This was a platform with around 9,000 artists, 47,000 NFTs minted, and a user base that, while passionate, was a rounding error compared to eBay's 130 million active buyers. The thesis presumably hinged on future growth, but even the most generous projections would have required a total reversal of the declining NFT market to make the maths work.
A Team Out of Its Depth
KnownOrigin began life as an experiment run from a basement pop-up in Manchester, where ten artists created 25 physical artworks linked to digital tokens via QR codes. It was scrappy, creative, and authentic — qualities that made it a beloved corner of the NFT world. But none of that translates into readiness for integration with a $25 billion publicly listed corporation.
The three co-founders — Andy Gray, David Moore, and James Morgan — all joined eBay upon acquisition. Moore, a UX consultant by background, has now reportedly been made redundant. Internal criticisms cited in reporting from Prolific North questioned the qualifications of the team leading eBay's web3 efforts, with sources describing a division that lacked direction and strategic clarity from the outset. When even your own staff doubt the credentials of the people running the initiative, the writing is on the wall.
Shareholders Deserved Better
The timing of eBay's web3 misadventure is made all the more grating when you look at how the company was simultaneously returning capital to shareholders. In 2023 alone, eBay returned $1.9 billion to investors through $1.4 billion in share buybacks and $528 million in dividends. Just days after news of the web3 layoffs broke in February 2024, eBay authorised an additional $2 billion for its stock repurchase programme.
Put simply: eBay had the cash and the mechanism to reward patient shareholders directly. Instead, a portion of corporate capital was diverted into an NFT experiment built on a platform that had done less than $8 million in total volume over its entire existence. The opportunity cost is not catastrophic in dollar terms — eBay is a $25 billion company — but it speaks to a deeper problem of executive decision-making. When the money is there to do buybacks, pay dividends, or invest in core marketplace technology, choosing to chase web3 headlines felt less like innovation and more like FOMO dressed in corporate language.
The Broader Pattern
eBay is far from alone in this. The 2021-2022 era produced a wave of corporate NFT acquisitions and web3 pivots that have aged poorly. But what distinguishes eBay's case is the mismatch between the ambition and the execution. The company's own press release described KnownOrigin as a 'leading NFT marketplace', a generous characterisation of a platform that ranked well behind OpenSea, Rarible, and Foundation by virtually every metric. eBay's statement following the layoffs claimed it 'remains committed to our web3 strategy,' a line that reads as boilerplate rather than conviction.
The NFT market peaked at roughly $25 billion in trading volume in 2021 before collapsing to a fraction of that. KnownOrigin's own numbers tell the story: $7.8 million in lifetime volume across six years is what a mid-tier OpenSea collection might do in a single afternoon during the boom. Acquiring this platform and expecting it to anchor a corporate web3 strategy was always a gamble on the macro continuing to run. When it didn't, there was no fallback.
What This Really Was
Strip away the press releases and the innovation theatre, and eBay's KnownOrigin acquisition looks like what it probably always was: a cash-rich corporation making a relatively small bet on a buzzword during a speculative mania, fronted by a founding team whose greatest achievement was building a beloved niche community, not scaling enterprise technology. There is no shame in KnownOrigin's origins or its contribution to digital art. The platform gave thousands of artists a genuine route to market. But that does not mean it was ever a credible foundation for a Fortune 500 web3 strategy.
The layoffs confirm what the market had been signalling for over a year. eBay would have been better served putting this money towards what it already does well, and returning the rest to the shareholders who have stuck around through a decade of competitive pressure from Amazon, Shopify, and Temu. Instead, 30 per cent of a team is now out of a job, a co-founder has been made redundant from the company he built, and eBay's web3 ambitions amount to little more than a footnote in the next annual report.
