The final wave of eBay's February layoffs has cleared out the remaining KnownOrigin staff in Manchester, closing the book on a Web3 venture that cost the company an NFT marketplace, a co-founder's redundancy, and whatever credibility it had in digital collectibles.
eBay's Web3 ambitions are officially over. The company's February round of layoffs, 800 positions and roughly six per cent of the global workforce, has swept out the last remaining members of the Manchester team that once ran KnownOrigin, the NFT marketplace eBay acquired in June 2022. LinkedIn posts from departing employees confirm what had been obvious for months: there is nobody left. The project shipped nothing. Not a single NFT was ever listed on eBay as a result of the acquisition. Not one product, feature, or integration made it out of the door.
Luke Strugnell O'Donnell, who describes himself as employee number one at KnownOrigin, posted that his five years at eBay had come to an end. "From being employee number one at KnownOrigin and riding the crest of the NFT wave, to being acquired by eBay and transitioning into the world of big tech," he wrote. Ray Mosley, the head of design who spent three years shaping KnownOrigin's visual identity under eBay's ownership, confirmed he had been made redundant "along with all my colleagues in Manchester." Mosley noted it was his first break in over 25 years of continuous employment. These are people who turned up every day to a project their employer had already abandoned in all but name, and whose reward for that loyalty was a redundancy package and a LinkedIn post.
The timeline tells a familiar story of corporate acquisition followed by slow dismemberment. eBay bought KnownOrigin in June 2022, when NFT trading volumes were already in steep decline from their 2021 peak but before the full scale of the collapse was apparent. The deal was part of a broader push into digital collectibles that included a partnership with music NFT platform OneOf and the £295 million acquisition of trading card marketplace TCGplayer. The stated ambition was to bring NFTs and digital collectibles to eBay's 130 million active buyers. It never happened. Four years on, there is not a single trace of Web3 technology anywhere on eBay's platform.
Within eighteen months, the strategy was in ruins. In February 2024, eBay slashed more than 30 per cent of its Web3 division staff and halted all plans for NFTs and digital collectibles on the main platform. Stef Jay, the business and strategy officer for the Web3 division, resigned. David Moore, one of KnownOrigin's three co-founders, was made redundant. Internal sources described the layoffs as "brutal" and blamed a lack of leadership and strategic direction from eBay's senior management. The Manchester team, the designers and developers who had built KnownOrigin from scratch and understood the technology, were left to maintain a platform their parent company had already decided to kill.
By July 2024, KnownOrigin announced it would shut down its on-chain marketplace and minting tools entirely. The platform that had spent four years cultivating a community of independent digital artists, and that had banned Iranian and Cuban creators one week before selling to eBay in order to satisfy American sanctions compliance, closed its doors with a brief statement citing "shifts in the NFT market." The artists who had built KnownOrigin's reputation lost their platform. The employees who had built the product lost their purpose.
The February 2026 layoffs are the final act. eBay framed the cuts as a company-wide restructuring to "align our structure with our strategic priorities," which now centre on AI and the acquisition of Depop from Etsy. The company did not specifically mention Web3, NFTs, or the Manchester office in its public communications, an omission that says everything about how thoroughly the experiment has been erased from eBay's corporate narrative. Four years, three rounds of layoffs, and an entire acquired company dissolved, with absolutely nothing to show for it.
What makes this particular failure instructive is not the money lost. eBay never disclosed the KnownOrigin acquisition price, though it was rumoured to be around the $70 million mark; however, that was subject to an earn-out, and given that the division shipped precisely nothing, how much of that figure was ever paid is an open question. What is less ambiguous is where at least some of the proceeds ended up. Companies House records show that David Moore and James Morgan each incorporated holding companies on the same day in November 2022, five months after the acquisition closed, both registered at the same address in Wilmslow, Cheshire. Both were classified as holding companies, both were initially dormant, and both have since filed full accounts. Morgan's vehicle held £4.8 million in investments and just over £1 million in cash as of March 2025. Moore's held £5.2 million in investments, £594,000 in cash, and carried a £5.5 million directors' loan on its books. The co-founders, it appears, did not walk away empty-handed.
The employees who stayed through the acquisition, the layoffs, the shutdown, and the final restructuring cannot say the same. Most of them had no say in the deal that brought eBay to Manchester, no influence over the strategy that followed, and no control over the three successive rounds of cuts that eventually emptied the office. By all accounts, the KnownOrigin team was a talented group of designers, developers, and community managers who cared about what they were building. One hopes the redundancy terms reflected that, because the outcome certainly didn't. The co-founders of KnownOrigin sold a lofty vision of decentralisation and putting Web3 on the map in the UK, but they sold out, and everyone else paid the price.
