The bear market, where Bitcoin and altcoins face brutal price movements, also negatively affects crypto money platforms. While bear markets can weed out bad players, they also force existing players to rethink their business strategies. Because they have to balance the resulting losses. For this reason, some platforms have started laying off some of their employees. Such news has recently come from Bybit and Australia-based crypto exchange Swyftx. Here are the details…
Cryptocurrency exchange removed 35 percent of its employees
Australian cryptocurrency exchange Swyftx has fired 35 percent of its employees (90 employees) as it tries to survive the brutal cryptocurrency winter. Most of the dismissed employees were in the research and development department. According to Swyftx’s latest legal filing, the exchange suffered a 23 percent drop in profits due to rapidly falling crypto prices. The exchange also laid off 74 employees earlier in the year.
Of course, Swyftx is not alone. Last week, Melbourne crypto firm CoinJar also laid off 20 percent of its employees. The entire cryptocurrency space has been shaken, mostly affected by the FTX crisis. Nearly 30,000 Australians have been impacted by the fall of the massive $32 billion FTX empire. While Swyftx wasn’t directly exposed to the troubled FTX exchange, it was hit by a crisis of confidence triggered by the company’s collapse.
Even before the FTX crash, some key players like Coinbase and Gemini had announced the extraction process. Also, as we reported on Kriptokoin.com, Kraken, Dapper Labs, Galaxy Digital, and other leading names were among those that had to downsize amid the ongoing crypto winter. However, Ripple and some other companies continue to recruit.
Bybit is also laying off its employees
Bybit announced that it entered a mass layoff process in 2022. The stock market went through such a process in the middle of 2022. Bybit’s co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou has announced a restructuring plan that marks a sharp reduction in the company’s workforce amid the protracted bear market. “Planned downsizing” affects all employees. Zhou said that this new reconfiguration “is upsetting everyone”.
Independent reporter Colin Wu stated that the layoff rate is 30 percent. He stated that employees affected by this situation will receive three months’ salary. Bybit had previously initiated a mass layoff process in June. Bybit’s headcount had grown from a few hundred to over 2,000 in two years. In announcing the upcoming downsizing, Zhou shared his intention to make the layoff process as smooth as possible. “It’s important to make sure Bybit has the right structure and resources to deal with the slowdown in the market”.
On November 24, Bybit launched a $100 million support fund to provide liquidity to institutional investors following the collapse of FTX. The fund was offered to eligible market makers and high-frequency trading institutions and distributed at 0% interest rate. The maximum amount distributed per applicant project was $10 million, provided the funds were used for spot and Tether perpetual futures contracts on Bybit.