Thompson, who held shares in Gem prior to the transaction, was terminated from Gem without severance at that time, and the deal with OpenSea was contingent upon both his departure from the company and his liquidation from Gem’s cap table, a spokesperson for OpenSea told TechCrunch. Thompson does not hold shares in Gem or OpenSea today.
“During the course of our diligence, we learned about, and immediately surfaced, some deeply concerning allegations against a now-former member of Gem’s leadership team who operated under the pseudonym Neso. Upon investigating the allegations, the employee was immediately exited prior to the close of this deal. This individual has never and will never be affiliated with OpenSea,” OpenSea wrote in the blog post.
Gem’s product allows users to buy NFTs across multiple marketplaces in a single transaction, pay with any ERC-20 token rather than spending their ETH and view analytics such as sales volume, floor prices and rarity-based ranking for NFT collections. As an aggregator, the company claims its product saves users up to 40% on gas fees compared to using an NFT marketplace like OpenSea directly. Its users often leverage the platform for “floor-sweeping,” a term that refers to acquiring multiple of the lowest-priced NFTs in a given project.
Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly featured an image belonging to a different company, also called Gem, that has no connection to the NFT aggregator. The image has been updated.
