Ethereum Giant Consensys Lays Off 20% of Staff During ETH Crisis

Ethereum software giant Consensys announced Tuesday that it has laid off 20% of its global workforce, amid a slowly recovering crypto economy that has failed to bring ETH’s stubbornly stagnant price down for months.

The decision affected 163 of Consensys’ 828 employees and affected every department of the company, a Consensys spokesperson said. Declutter. Affected employees will receive severance packages and extended stock option periods, and will continue to receive healthcare benefits in the relevant jurisdictions.

More broadly, the contraction also marks a change in strategy for the company, which for years has invested heavily in incubating a wide range of projects operating in or related to the Ethereum ecosystem. (Declutter was one such company, and Consensys is still around one of 22 investors in the editorially independent publication.)

Going forward, the company spokesperson said, Consensys plans to pull back and focus on supporting proven “core” winners in its portfolio, especially the crypto wallet. Metamask and Ethereum Layer-2 network Line.

“Looking ahead, I see a next-generation economy that is not dominated by large monolithic corporations; instead, smaller, nimble, AI-charged companies with Web3-based coordination tools will operate more efficiently,” Consensys CEO and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin said in a blog post. “To remain competitive in this fast-growing space, we must reshape ourselves and be more agile, effective and even better performing.”

Lubin further attributed the cuts to regulatory uncertainty in the United States and “broader macroeconomic conditions.”

Consensys had dust accumulations with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this year, but appeared to emerge triumphant when the SEC reportedly decreased his research into Ethereum’s security status earlier this summer. Shortly thereafter, however, the SEC did so sue Consensys on MetaMask, where the crypto wallet strike is marked by illegal securities offerings.

Salvation for Consensys in the crypto market, meanwhile, has remained stubbornly elusive. As a mainstay cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin continues to search for new all-time highs, ETH has fallen by around 35% since March to a lackluster level $2,618 when writing.

Some analysts have expressed this recently concern that Ethereum’s recent streak technical performance– chief among them, distributing on-chain traffic to a spectrum of cheaper and faster Layer-2 networks – could significantly depress ETH’s price in the long term by putting the token on an inflationary path.

Lubin’s Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has done just that in recent weeks advocated to new fee-sharing models that could potentially help address these issues and bring value back to Ethereum, while still reaping the benefits of layer 2 chains.

Meanwhile, the 163 Consensys employees who received pink slips today find themselves at a crossroads in a crypto job market, colored by insecurity And contraction in a sense, and cautious optimism in another. Next week’s US presidential election faces perhaps the biggest of them all, with the potential to disappear completely reform US crypto policy.

Edited by Andrew Hayward