A platform for trading and lending cryptocurrency, BlockFi laying off employees. The companies are laying off 20 percent of its 850 employees — around 170 to 200 people. According to CEO Zac Prince’s Twitter thread this is the result of a “dramatic shift in macroeconomic conditions” and BlockFi’s attempt to become profitable.
Market’s condition and Laying Off Employees
BlockFi is not the only company laying off employees. Crypto.com is going to lay off around 260 workers or around 5 percent of its workforce, according to a Twitter thread from its CEO, Kris Marszalek. Added to that Celsius, a lending platform, has halted withdrawals because of extreme market conditions. Moreover Binance, a large crypto exchange, paused Bitcoin withdrawals for about three hours saying that some technical issue had taken place. In past few coins like Terra are going to zero. Coinbase also started to slow down their hiring in May and cancelled over 300 job offers the next month. Just like that month; several other companies, like Gemini, Mercado Bitcoin, and Bitso terminated 10 percent of their workers in past few months.
The reason
The reason behind laying off employees is that the crypto market is struggling as the value of Bitcoin and Ethereum is going down. But according to BlockFi the layoffs come after a period of explosive growth. Earlier at the time when covid 19 pandemic caused lockdown, the space for crypto currency has exploded, prices for major coins started to increase. But in 2022 the interest rates have gone up, so the growth has stopped and the market is going in a reverse direction. As a result trillions of dollars in value have been wiped out from the crypto market. Finally the companies, including BlockFi and Crypto.com, the bearers of the market are facing a big trouble. It’s also noticeable that the stock prices of the market is in a dropping stage.
The alarming thing is that because of this bad condition of the crypto market the tech and finance-related companies like Klarna, Netflix, Tesla, Cameo, and Better.com are also thinking about layoffs. Moreover Meta are slowing down their hiring.
