- Swyftex has no exposure to FTX, whose failure has shaken the Australian digital market as well
- The company said its team has up to five times more members than most domestic exchanges
Swyftx, an Australian cryptocurrency exchange, has announced a 40% reduction in the workforce due to the worsening bear market, accentuated by the downfall of FTX.
The company has taken this hard decision as it prepares for the “worst case scenario” where the bear market continues for next year and beyond, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Alex Harper said. The decision also factors in the possibility of more FTX-like collapses. A majority of the layoffs will take place in the company’s R&D team, media reports said.
Acting Fast and Early
“Our business is uniquely well-positioned to weather events like FTX… But as much as we might wish it, we do not exist in isolation from the market and that’s why we are acting fast and acting early by significantly reducing the size of our team,” Harper told the staff. The latest round of layoffs will impact around 90 employees.
Earlier this year, Swyftx implemented job cuts that impacted 74 employees.
In June, Swyftx announced a merger deal with online share trading platform Superhero that creates a $1.5 billion entity with 800,000 customers. This was the first merger in the Australian market in which a crypto trading platform merged with a traditional trading platform.
“We have the largest team of any fully owned and operated Australian exchange, with up to five times more team members than most of our main domestic competitors. We are simply far larger than we need to be to operate and grow next year and beyond,” Harper explained.
More Layoffs
Last week, another leading Australian crypto exchange, Coinjar, laid off 20% of its employees in a bid to “right-size parts of the team in response to poor market conditions”.
Swyftx doesn’t have exposure to FTX but it has shaken the confidence of many players in the crypto industry. “Cryptocurrency wasn’t the villain in this story, it was all too familiar human greed and indifference,” Harper said.
