Among today’s crypto news, Filecoin Protocol Labs, the creator of the Filecoin blockchain network, recently announced its intention to lay off 21% of its staff. The company cited the current economic situation and the cryptocurrency winter as reasons behind its decision.
Protocol Labs CEO Juan Benet published a blog post on Friday announcing these layoffs. Benet pointed out in the blog post that it has been an extremely challenging economic downturn, throughout the world and especially in the cryptocurrency industry.
Summary
What are the causes of the layoffs for Filecoin?
As anticipated, CEO Juan Benet wrote a blog post, titled “Focusing Our Strategy to Weather Crypto Winter,” to explain the layoffs. He cited the “extremely challenging economic downturn” that has hit the cryptocurrency industry particularly hard.
Specifically, Benet’s blog reads:
“The macro winter has made the cryptocurrency winter worse, making it more extreme and potentially longer than our industry anticipated. Although we worked very hard to avoid this, we made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by 89 roles (about 21%).Â
This impacts people in PLGO teams (PL Corp, PL Member Services, Network Goods, PL Outercore, and PL Starfleet). We had to focus our workforce on the most impactful and business-critical efforts.”
Protocol Labs joined the list of companies in the cryptocurrency industry that laid off employees during the cryptocurrency winter. Other companies focused on cryptocurrencies and blockchain, such as Candy Digital , Blockchain.com, Opensea, Huobi, and Gemini, have also cut staff.
Industry-wide layoffs started gaining momentum last year and continued into 2023. In its blog post on Friday, Benet noted that the changes will be hard on all Labbers and the company will host a “PLGO All Hands” meeting on Monday to answer any remaining questions.
Thus, Protocol Labs will cut 89 roles in several teams, including enterprise, member services, and network assets, among others. The blog post did not say whether the team working on FIlecoin was affected. Overall, the cryptocurrency industry continues to be hit hard by layoffs, with nearly 29,000 jobs cut since April.
Price trend of the crypto Filecoin (FIL): all the details
Filecoin’s native cryptocurrency, FIL, currently ranks 35th in the crypto-economy as measured by market capitalization. As of Saturday 4 February 2023, the market valuation of Filecoin (FIL) was about $2.11 billion, with a global trading volume of about $136 million in the past 24 hours.
FIL has gained 65.7% against the US dollar over the past 30 days and has outperformed major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).
Despite the 65.7% increase, FIL is still down more than 97% from its all-time high of $236 per coin reached on 1 April 2021. Moreover, at 3:30 PM (CET) on 4 February 2023, FIL was trading for $5.59 per unit.
Thus, the price has increased by 4.04% in the last 24 hours. In the last week, FIL has increased by more than 5.0% from $5.34 to its current price. Filecoin’s trading volume has risen 53.0% over the past week, moving along with the overall circulating supply of the coin, which has increased by 1.91%.
This brings the circulating supply to 381.39 million, which represents about 19.4% of its maximum supply of 1.97 billion.
Crypto layoffs amid bear market and crypto winter
The inexorable cryptocurrency winter has unfortunately continued to affect the entire blockchain industry, forcing some of the industry’s largest companies to curb their growth ambitions
As these cryptocurrency companies try to stay afloat, a list has been compiled of industry players that have cut back on staff. As of 3 February, an estimated 29,602 jobs have been lost in the cryptocurrency industry, based on media reports and press releases.
Specifically, in addition to Filecoin, cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex is cutting more than 80 positions from its workforce. Blockchain analytics company Chainalysis is reducing its workforce by 5%, cutting about 40-50 positions. The company says it employs more than 900 people.
Prime Trust, a cryptocurrency services company based in Las Vegas, Nevada, is also cutting its workforce by a third, according to some sources. Matrixport, a Singapore-based cryptographic services provider, is downsizing its estimated roster of 290 people by 10%.
It doesn’t end there, because cryptocurrency exchange Gemini is also cutting another 10%, or about 100 employees, from its workforce. Its headcount was about 1,000 employees in November 2022, according to PitchBook data.
The Fidelity-backed OSL exchange is cutting workers by a third, but did not disclose the amount of the reduction.
Crypto.com said it is reducing its workforce by about 20%. The exchange has about 3500-4500 employees, placing its current round of layoffs at about 700-900 employees
