- Team back to 12-month-ago levels: Powell
- Crypto sector loses 12,000 jobs since April
Citing current market conditions, US-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has announced a 30% reduction in headcount, which is approximately 1,100 employees. In a statement on its website Jesse Powell, Co-Founder and CEO, said the team size, after the reduction, is back to where it was a year ago.
Statement from Jess Powell
Powell, who had announced to have stepped down as the CEO of Kraken in September, has signed the statement as the CEO which indicates he may still be holding the position, technically. Also, the announcement from Powell, who co-founded Kraken in 2011, may help the hard news land a little softer on the affected employees.
“Over the past few years, hundreds of millions of new users entered the crypto space and millions of new clients put their trust in Kraken during that time. We had to grow fast, more than tripling our workforce in order to provide those clients with the quality and service they expect of us,” Powell explained the hires made during the 2021 bull run which turns out to be unsustainable in the current crypto winter.
Kraken has offered 16 weeks of basic pay to each departing employee. Those entitled to a performance bonus will receive it. The blog spells out other benefits including healthcare coverage.
“I’m confident the steps we are taking today will ensure we can continue to deliver on our mission which the world needs now more than ever before. I remain extremely bullish on crypto and Kraken,” Powell concluded.
In line with the broader market trend
With this, Kraken joins the long list of crypto exchanges and other digital asset companies that have resorted to lay-offs to preserve liquidity and overcome the financial crunch arising out of the prolonged bear market. Kraken’s number of laid-off employees is the same as that of Coinbase, for which the retrenchments, announced in June, constituted 13% of its workforce.
As per media reports, the global cryptocurrency sector has seen over 12,000 jobs lost since April this year.
