Ethereum software company Consensus announced on Tuesday that it is laying off about 20% of its global workforce, bringing with it the stubborn price of ETH, which has struggled for months in the slowly recovering crypto economy.
The decision affects 163 of Consensys' 828 employees and affects all departments within the company, a Consensys spokeswoman said. Decrypt. Affected employees will receive severance packages and extended stock option windows and will continue to receive health care benefits in their respective jurisdictions.
More broadly, the contract marks a shift in strategy for the company, which has spent years building projects that work within or are related to the Ethereum ecosystem. (Decrypt One of these companies was, and Consensys remains One of the 22 investors In an editorially independent publication.)
According to a company spokesperson, Consensus plans to pull back and focus on supporting proven “core” winners in its portfolio, especially crypto wallets. MetaMask and Ethereum layer-2 network Line.
“Looking ahead, I see the next generation economy not being dominated by large monopolistic companies. Instead, small, agile, AI-enhanced companies with Web3-based coordination tools will operate more efficiently,” said Joe Lubin, CEO of Consensus and co-founder of Ethereum. Blog post. “To be competitive in this fast-growing space, we must adapt and become more efficient, more effective and even more efficient.”
Lubin also attributed the decline to regulatory uncertainty in the United States and “broader macroeconomic conditions.”
He had a deal. Dust-bugs This year with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but the SEC emerged victorious when reported. He came down Earlier this summer, the investigation into the security situation of Ethereum. Soon, however, the SEC did A snack Communications on MetaMask, a crypto wallet that has posted illegal collateral offers.
Survival in the crypto market, meanwhile, has remained stubbornly difficult. As major cryptocurrencies Bitcoin Continue to look for new all-time highs, ETH has fallen 35% since March, to weak 2,618 dollars Writing.
Some commentators have recently stated. Risk Ethereum's latest kill Technical achievementsChief among them, the distribution of on-chain traffic to cheaper and faster layer-2 networks – putting the token on a path to inflation that will ultimately depress the value of ETH.
Lubin's friend, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, has in recent weeks. defended New payment sharing models are coming to solve those problems and bring value back to Ethereum and the benefits of layer-2 chains.
Meanwhile, the 163 Consensus employees who received pink slips today find themselves at a crossroads in the crypto job market. Uncertainty And Contraction On the one hand and Cautious optimism In another. Next week's U.S. presidential election has the potential to be, perhaps more than anything else, even entirely so. Re-shaping American crypto policy.
Edited by Andrew Hayward.
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