Mastercard’s NFT Product Lead Resigns, Leaves Behind a Surprising Farewell Gift
Satvik Sethi, the former Non-Fungible Token (NFT) Product Lead at Mastercard, has made a unique and fitting resignation announcement. On Thursday, Sethi surprised the NFT community by minting his resignation letter as an NFT, showcasing his expertise in the field and leaving a lasting impact.
“I have resigned from Mastercard,” Sethi said to open his Twitter thread on the topic on February 2. He noted that, for the past year, he had served as the NFT Product Lead at the company, where he “evangelized Web3 for Mastercard leadership & regional teams, as well as all our Fortune 500 clients & partners.”
Sethi decided to mint his resignation letter as an open-edition NFT on Ethereum via the digital collectibles protocol Manifold. This project is called “New Beginnings”. The price is ETH 0,023, and 100% of the proceeds “go to survival,” he said. By the time of writing, there were 64 total minted NFTs.
The letter spoke of Sethi’s passion for Web3 and its potential, of valuable experiences gained at Mastercard and those that had led him to financial struggles.
Working at Mastercard, living in Airbnb
Sethi’s letter and Twitter thread described the struggles he had to face, despite working for such a gigantic company.
After moving from New York to London, he said, due to certain visa issues, his salary was “cut by 40% with my workload increasing 200%” – forcing him to work side jobs to make ends meet.
Sethi claimed that,
“At Mastercard, I was a victim of harassment & emotional distress caused by a series of mismanaged processes, miscommunication, internal inefficiency. There were months at a time when I wouldn’t receive my salary until I begged across the hierarchy for it, among many other issues.”
Among other claims in his letter, Sethi said that, because of the salary cut, as a single-income immigrant in London, he was ineligible for housing, writing:
“I have had to move from Airbnb to Airbnb for over a year.”
More issues arose when Sethi attempted to resign and when he finally did so.
When I tried to fight back and informed them that I had records of my conversations, they locked and disabled all my accounts, and with that preventing me from accessing ideas I spent months designing and not even giving me a chance to say goodbye to my team, clients, & peers. pic.twitter.com/fnqKs3I7HW
— satvik (@sxtvik) February 2, 2023
When it comes to his future, Sethi said that he would be based in India for a while, until he is able to find suitable employment. He can no longer stay in the UK, as he lost his work visa after quitting his job.
While he is likely to deal with more issues this situation has brought on, he said he would focus on his art and on his own Web3 social networking and community-building site joincircle. The site has over 90,000 signups, he said, as well as more than 35 partner communities.
Meanwhile, Mastercard has been slowly entering the world of Web3 and NFTs, particularly over the last year. As reported last June, the company said it would begin enabling NFT trading for a range of crypto-ecosystem platforms, including the marketplace Immutable X, Candy Digital, the metaverse gaming title The Sandbox, Mintable, Spring, the Nifty Gateway, and the Web3 infrastructure provider MoonPay.
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