Early Friday morning, retail-focused crypto exchange Crypto.com, the third-largest company in the space by headcount, announced it would be laying off 20% of its staff, becoming the latest player in the industry to announce cuts this year.
“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,” Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek said in a blog post.
“We’ve had to navigate ongoing economic headwinds and unforeseeable industry events,” he added.
Following Friday’s cuts, Crypto.com employs an estimated 3,600 to 4,500 employees. Last year, the company announced a layoff of 5% of staff, or 260 workers, in June. Another round of layoffs from July through October at the company was reported to have included an additional 2,000 employees.
A spokesperson for the company would not confirm Crypto.com’s current headcount at press time.
Hit by shrinking investor appetite for risky assets, cryptocurrency prices plunged last year, leading to the collapse of some heavily leveraged investors. The impacts continue to ripple through the industry in the form of layoffs and bankruptcies.
In announcing Friday’s staff cuts, Marszalek specifically noted the collapse of FTX, “significantly damaged trust in the industry.”
Just two weeks into 2023, already crypto firms have let go of more than 2,600 workers, according to Yahoo Finance’s tally.
Crypto.com’s headcount reduction follows layoffs made by Blockchain.com, which were first reported by CoinDesk and confirmed by a Blockchain.com spokesperson, which totaled 28% of its workforce, or 110 employees worldwide.
Other layoffs announced in the crypto industry since Jan. 5 include Consensys (at least 10% of its team, or 100 employees), Coinbase (20% of its team, or 950 employees), Huobi (20% of its team, or 200 employees), Genesis (30% of its team, or an estimated 60 employees), Silvergate (40% of staff, or 200 employees), and NFT platform SuperRare (30% of staff, or an estimated 27 employees).
These layoffs adds to the at least 9,500 workers let go by firms of the once buzzy — and now capital constrained — sector, according to an annual report from The Block Research.
Meanwhile, the industry’s largest player, Binance, which hasn’t announced layoffs since cryptocurrencies started to plunge last May, is planning to scale its workforce by as much as 30% in 2023, CEO Changpeng Zhao said at a conference on Wednesday.
Binance had approximately 7,300 employees as of the end of 2022, up from 650 as of October 2019, according to the Block Research.
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