Blockchain.com Cuts Staff as Layoffs Persist

Cryptocurrency trading platform Blockchain.com is reportedly cutting 28% of its workforce.

“The crypto ecosystem faces significant headwinds as it corrects its course from last year’s challenges,” the company told CoinDesk in an email published on Thursday (Jan 12). “To better balance product offerings with demand, we have made the difficult decision to reduce operating costs and headcount to downsize the company.”

PYMNTS reached out to Blockchain.com for comment but did not receive a response.

These job cuts, which affect 110 workers, follow an earlier round of layoffs at the company, which laid off 150 workers in June last year.

Those layoffs occurred in the wake of the company’s $270 million loss to Three Arrows Capital, a crypto hedge fund that had an estimated $10 billion in assets and made some extremely risky bets on decentralized finance projects like stablecoin. Terra/LUNA algorithm.

October saw reports that Blockchain.com was considering a “downstream round” of funding that would have reduced the company’s value from the $14 billion it reached in early 2022.

The job cuts at Blockchain.com come days after cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said it was cutting 20% ​​of its staff as the industry continues to suffer during its long “winter.”

“As we examined our 2023 scenarios, it became clear that we would need to reduce expenses to increase our chances of getting it right in each scenario,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong told employees earlier this week as the company led out its third round of cuts.

“While it’s always painful to be separated from our peers, there was no way to significantly reduce our expenses without considering personnel changes.”

Other cryptocurrency firms cutting jobs include cryptocurrency lender Genesis, which is reportedly laying off 30% of its employees and also considering bankruptcy, and exchange Kraken.

According to CoinDesk, the layoffs leave Blockchain.com with 280 workers, having grown from 160 staff members at the start of 2021. Laid off employees will receive severance packages.

An outlier in all this is the largest exchange in the industry, Binance, which said this week that it plans to increase its staff by 15-30% this year after hiring nearly 5,000 workers in 2022.

“We will continue to build and hopefully pick up again before the next bull market,” CEO Changpeng Zhao said at an industry conference on Wednesday (Jan 11).