Cryptocurrency Firm Polygon Labs Lays Off 20% of Staff as Route Worsens

polygon There are 500 full time employees. In a blog post, the company said that each of the affected employees will receive three months’ salary, regardless of their level or tenure at the company.

The company’s coffers remain “healthy” with a balance sheet of more than $250 million, according to the statement.

consolidation process

The layoffs come after Labs merged several business units earlier this year. On January 11, Polygon announced its corporate reorganization, which now “unites all of our employees under one group of companies called Polygon Labs.”

Earlier in December, the company also made adjustments to its community programs, which led to the end of grants and the closure of its DAO, or Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

Polygon, primarily an open-source blockchain, also had Polygon Studios, its NFT, gaming and metaverse arm, associated with it. Under the new structure, the name and brand “Polygon Studios” will be discontinued and the Polygon Foundation, based in the Cayman Islands, will wholly own the newly created Polygon Labs.

In 2022, Polygon raised $450 million in a private token sale and has been on an expansion spree partnering with several global groups on various Web3 related projects and also poaching developers from its rivals.

The decentralized platform that makes the digital coin Ethereum more accessible was founded back in 2017 as Matic and rebranded to Polygon in February 2021.

Over a trillion dollars in value has been wiped out cryptocurrency Rising interest rates in 2022 have raised concerns of an economic recession.

The crash led to high-profile bankruptcies of major industry players such as crypto hedge funds Three Arrows Capital and Celsius Network.

The biggest blow to the crypto sector came after major exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy protection in November last year. Its rapid decline has led to tough global regulatory scrutiny of how cryptocurrency companies hold funds and conduct business operations.

The 2022 layoffs coincided with a flurry of layoffs across the industry following a plunge in token prices, including Coinbase Global, Blockchain.com and Crypto.com. The firms collectively shed hundreds of jobs in the first two months of 2023 alone.

In January this year, Luno, owned by Digital Currency Group, said it would lay off 35% of its total workforce to cope with the downturn in the crypto market.

with agency inputs