Protocol Labs CEO Juan Benet published a blog post on Friday announcing that the company will lay off 21% of its workforce. Protocol Labs is the creator of the blockchain network Filecoin. Benet emphasized in the blog post that this is a “very challenging recession globally, especially in the crypto industry.”
Protocol Labs lays off staff in response to macro winter and cryptocurrency market slump
Protocol Labs, the company behind the file storage blockchain network Filecoin, announced on Feb. 3 that it is laying off some employees. CEO Juan Benet wrote a blog post titled “Focus on our strategy to weather crypto winter” to explain the layoffs. He mentioned that the “extremely challenging recession” has hit the crypto industry particularly hard. “The macro winter exacerbates the crypto winter, making it more extreme and likely longer than our industry anticipates,” Bennett wrote.
“While we’ve tried very hard to avoid this situation, we’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by 89 roles (approximately 21%),” the blog post detailed. “This affects individuals within the PLGO team (PL Corp, PL Member Services, Network Goods, PL Outercore and PL Starfleet). We have had to focus our staff on the most impactful and business critical work.”
Protocol Labs joins the list of crypto industry businesses laying off staff during the “crypto winter.” Other companies focused on cryptocurrencies and blockchain, such as Candy Digital, Blockchain.com, Opensea, Huobi and Gemini, have also laid off staff. Layoffs across the industry accelerated last year and will continue through 2023. Benet noted in his Friday blog post that “change will be tough for all Labbers,” and that the company will answer any remaining questions on Monday.
Filecoin’s native cryptocurrency FIL is currently ranked 35th in the cryptoeconomy based on market capitalization. As of Saturday, February 4, 2023, filecoin (FIL) has a market valuation of approximately $2.11 billion, with a global trading volume of approximately $136 million over the past 24 hours. In the past 30 days, FIL has gained 65.7% against the US dollar, outperforming leading 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 token set on April 1, 2021. On February 4, 2023 at 3:30 PM ET, FIL was trading at $5.59 per unit.
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Jamie Redman
Jamie Redman is the Head of News for Bitcoin.com News and a fintech reporter based in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He is passionate about Bitcoin, open source code and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written over 6,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.
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