- DYdX and Consensys laid off 35% and 20% of their workforces respectively.
- But the crypto hiring market is hot, buoyed by the expectation Bitcoin will hit a new all-time high by year’s end.
A pair of crypto companies announced dramatic cuts on Tuesday just as a market rally pushed Bitcoin near its all-time high.
Decentralised crypto exchange developer dYdX cut 35% of its staff Tuesday, CEO Antonio Juliano said in a statement.
Those layoffs came hours after Consensys, the company behind the Metamask crypto wallet, 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 almost 400 crypto workers have lost their jobs so far this year, according to Layoffs.fyi. That’s down from the brutal purges of 2022 and 2023, when around 8,300 and 6,800 crypto workers lost their jobs respectively.
The new layoffs also come against a backdrop of crypto investors prepare for a bull market that could send Bitcoin to record highs.
Analysts anticipate the industry to rally thanks to a combination of macroeconomic factors like a Chinese stimulus package, Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, and the possible election of Donald Trump.
That’s kept the job market active, according to a recent DL News report. The top 10 exchanges are looking to fill around 1,100 roles right now. Fintechs and traditional payments providers are also recruiting crypto talent.
Consenys blames SEC
Neither dYdX nor Consensys shared the exact number of employees who were laid off. In a brief blog post published Wednesday, Kraken said it was “making organizational discipline decisions” after appointing venture investor Arjun Sethi as co-CEO. But the company did not say whether it had cut employees, and a Kraken declined to comment when contacted by DL News.
Juliano shared few details 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 went from “startup mode” to “company mode.”
“I went from managing the whole team to five layers of hierarchy between the builders and me,” he wrote.
“No more execs, no more middle management, no more company processes, no more fucking anything except the builders and me.”
Consensys, meanwhile, blamed the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s “abuse of power” for its woes.
Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin said that 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 that it had been served with a Wells notice — an SEC letter informing recipients of looming enforcement action.
“Such attacks from the US government will end up costing many companies that have been investigated, sued, or sent Wells Notices, many millions of dollars,” Lubin wrote in a blog announcing the layoffs.
The company sued the SEC later that month for allegedly waging a “campaign to seize control over the future of cryptocurrency.”
Industry stalwarts Coinbase, Greyscale, and the Blockchain Association, have also taken 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’ “progressively decentralising itself.”
“Consensys is transforming itself to naturally evolve from a company into a Network State over time,” he wrote.
“By right-sizing and re-architecting our company now towards being a more loosely coupled set of orthogonal teams, we are positioning ourselves to contribute more effectively.”
Update, October 30: This story was updated to include reports that Kraken had laid off 15% of its workforce and that a spokesperson declined to comment on those reports.
Aleks Gilbert is a DeFi correspondent based in New York. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.
