- DYdX and Consensys have laid off 35% and 20% of their workforce, respectively.
- But the crypto hiring market is booming, buoyed by hopes that Bitcoin will hit a new all-time high by the end of the year.
Two crypto companies announced dramatic reductions on Tuesday, just as a market rally pushed Bitcoin near its all-time high.
Decentralized crypto exchange developer dYdX cut 35% of its staff on Tuesday, CEO Antonio Juliano said in a statement.
The layoffs came hours after Consensys, the company behind crypto wallet Metamask, cut 20% of its workforce.
And on Wednesday, crypto exchange Kraken laid off about 15% of its workforce, the New York Times reported.
The news comes as nearly 400 crypto workers have lost their jobs so far this year, according to Layoffs.fyi. This is down from the brutal purges of 2022 and 2023, where around 8,300 and 6,800 crypto workers lost their jobs respectively.
The new layoffs also come amid crypto investors bracing for a bull market that could propel Bitcoin to record highs.
Analysts expect the sector to recover thanks to a combination of macroeconomic factors such as a Chinese stimulus plan, Bitcoin exchange-traded funds and the possible election of Donald Trump.
This helped keep the job market active, according to a recent study DL News report. The top 10 exchanges are currently looking to fill approximately 1,100 positions. Fintechs and traditional payment providers are also recruiting crypto talent.
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Consenys accuses the SEC
Neither dYdX nor Consensys shared the exact number of laid-off employees. In a brief blog post published Wednesday, Kraken said it was “making decisions about organizational discipline” after naming venture capitalist Arjun Sethi as co-CEO. But the company did not say whether it had cut staff, and Kraken declined to comment when contacted by DL News.
Juliano shared some details on Tuesday about the reason for the cuts at dYdX. But in a subsequent blog post published Wednesday, he said the company had stagnated as it moved from “startup mode” to “enterprise mode.”
“I went from managing the entire team to five hierarchical levels between the manufacturers and me,” he wrote.
“No more executives, no more middle management, no more business processes, no more nothing but the manufacturers and me.”
Consensys, meanwhile, blamed its woes on the “abuse of power” of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin said the SEC’s crypto crackdown, combined with “regulatory uncertainty” and “broader macroeconomic conditions,” has “made navigating our evolving space unnecessarily complex for innovators , builders, investors and businesses.”
Consensys said in April it received a Wells Notice – a letter from the SEC notifying recipients of impending enforcement action.
“Such attacks by the U.S. government will ultimately cost many millions of dollars to many companies that have been the subject of Wells investigations, lawsuits, or notices,” Lubin wrote in a blog announcing the layoffs .
The company sued the SEC later that month for allegedly waging a “campaign to take control of the future of cryptocurrency.”
Industry stalwarts Coinbase, Greyscale, and the Blockchain Association also took the SEC to court to challenge its campaign to bring crypto to heel.
In his blog post, Lubin said the layoffs were part of Consensys’ “gradual decentralization.”
“Consensys is transforming to naturally evolve from an enterprise to a network state over time,” he wrote.
“By resizing and reorganizing our company to become a collection of more loosely coupled orthogonal teams, we are positioning ourselves to contribute more effectively. »
Update, October 30: This story was updated to include information that Kraken had laid off 15% of its workforce and a spokesperson declined to comment on the information.
Aleks Gilbert is a DeFi correspondent based in New York. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.
