Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing, bonus story of the week.

Today on Forbes, former NFT specialist, OpenC, is remaking itself into a crypto trading aggregator.

As crypto receives a warm embrace in Washington and token prices rise to new levels,

some once-hot digital asset sectors like NFTs continue to languish.

Few firms have suffered the brunt of NFTs collapse more than NFT specialist OpenC.

Starting in mid-20202, the market for digital art represented by these unique non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, from

crypto punks to board apes, experienced a spectacular fall, declining by more than 80%.

By October 2023, OpenC, the once dominant venue for buying and selling NFTs, was bringing

in just $3 million in monthly revenue, down from

a peak of $125 million in January 2022. The same month, the startup was valued at $13.3 billion,

briefly giving its co-founder's ownership stakes worth more than $2 billion.

It wasn't just that people had lost interest in NFTs. OpenC had also

been abruptly overtaken by an upstart competitor, Blur, which charged zero trading fees and didn't

require buyers to pay royalties to NFT creators. When OpenC responded by loosening its own royalty policy,

it drew the ire of its customers on Twitter,

who said everything from, quote, you people are foul, to characterizing it as, quote, evil, and, quote,

a joke of a company.

As OpenC was hemorrhaging cash and struggling for market share, co-founder and CEO Devin Finser held a company meeting for 175

staffers on payroll. He told employees that the company needed a reset and that he would be

firing more than half of them. His goal, to emerge again as a smaller, nimbler startup,

where every remaining employee was enthusiastic about reinventing the company.

Finser offered severance packages to anyone who hadn't been laid off, but also wanted out.

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