On Friday, crypto exchange Crypto.com announced that it is slashing its global workforce by 20 percent while citing the currency macroeconomic challenges and what it called “unforeseeable” events in the crypto space.
Since the year began, a handful of crypto businesses have either slashed their workforce or announced plans to do so. Last week, crypto lending platform Genesis announced that it was reducing its workforce by 30 percent. Huobi, a crypto exchange based in Seychelles announced job cuts of 20 percent. This week, Coinbase announced that it was slashing its workforce by 20 percent. Amid all of these job cuts, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced plans to increase its workforce by 15 percent to 30 percent this year.
Crypto.com’s latest decision follows the reduction in its workforce mid-last year which affected 250 positions. According to a handful of reports, the latest job cut involved at least 2,000 who were either let go or left by their own decision. The company, which also like a handful of other exchanges, blamed the collapse of FTX for its dilemma. Crypto.com noted that FTX’s collapse “significantly damaged trust in the industry.”
In a blog post, crypto.com’s co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek said, “We grew ambitiously at the start of 2022, building on our incredible momentum and aligning with the trajectory of the broader industry. That trajectory changed rapidly with a confluence of negative economic developments.”
Last year was particularly tough for Crypto.com, apart from the macroeconomic challenges that rocked the crypto space. The exchange faced massive criticism for its Matt Damon ad which was termed as creepy and overly enthusiastic. It also sent an Australian customer over $10 million and faced concerns concerning its financial performance.
Another source of worry arose after auditing firm Mazars announced that it had paused its work with crypto clients, days after giving Crypto.com a vote of confidence that users’ assets were fully backed.
Speaking on the latest decision, Crypto.com’s CEO said that “The reductions we made last July positioned us to weather the macroeconomic downturn, but it did not account for the recent collapse of FTX, which significantly damaged trust in the industry. It’s for this reason, as we continue to focus on prudent financial management, we made the difficult but necessary decision to make additional reductions in order to position the company for long-term success.”
Reductions in the workforce have become one of the significant strategies being applied by various crypto (and even NFT) firms looking to survive in the current macroeconomic realities.
Ibhadojemu Lucky Emmanuel is a graduate of Education and Economics from the University of Benin. He has a passion for tech and business and has been writing professionally for over a period of five years. He's written across various topics and segments and knew tech-business was it when he first stumbled on it. He has a great passion for music and arts, and wants to visit as many countries as he can someday.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
