South Korea’s major cryptocurrency exchange, Bithumb, got hacked in the mid of 2018 and ever since then, it has been fraught to get back on track. The supposed ‘second winter of crypto, which started to show its traces in the second part of the previous year, has managed to aggravate further the uncertainties relating to this company.
Bithumb’s situation becomes known only as of late when reports of the start-up downsizing its staff to half started floating around. It has been informed by an anonymous executive from Bithumb that the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange will decrease the number of its employees from 310 at the start of March to around 150. Apparently, the company’s trading volume has decreased, and the platform is desperately taking core measures to alleviate other monetary damage.
It was made clear by a representative from the company that the 160 staffers who will be eliminated from their roles will not be left to fend for themselves, as these former employees will be required to provide “assistance and training for job placement”; however, the details of the said program remain blurry. For ‘several new businesses’Bithumb will continue to employ new staff- as stated by the company.
While this crypto asset startup is suffering, on one hand, the economy of crypto as a whole might soon be able to see restoration on an epic scale. A foremost regional social media giant, Kakao with 44 million users, supposedly has major plans for its Talk application. The platform is going to release a native cryptocurrency wallet, for its famous platform of instant messaging. Asian countries are known to have incorporated blockchain and cryptocurrency adoption into their economy with a warm embrace. This contribution which is to arrive along with Clayton, the blockchain platform can manage to once more, gain acceptance in these countries.
There has been one layoff after another in the market lately.
Even in circumstances where Bithumb manages to better its prospects in the market through local adoption, for many worldwide companies, things are not looking very good.
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Tel Aviv based First Digital Assets Group (FDA), an Israeli upstart disclosed just a few weeks ago that that many employees would be dropped by the company. One Alpha, the research division of the industry will be completely cut down as a part of this elimination by the FDA.
Several ventures of this blockchain application group like Titan, Knox, K1, and Stamina are also being cast aside, with most of these affiliates’ facets being merged with the parent group.
However, this seems to be just a small part of a large movement.
37 employees were laid off by ShapeShift. Erik Voorhees, the CEO tried to explain the situation by claiming that the firm had plans to develop into other opportunities, like CoinCap and KeepKey rapidly.
Even Bitmain has allegedly suffered a loss of 1,000 staffers, after eliminating a number of its facets, with even Jihan Wu staying afloat.
The organization responsible behind the major development of the XEM digital asset, the NEM Foundation, also hacked off 60% of its monthly burn rate, probably laying off quite a few from its employee base of a solid 150.
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The irony of this situation is that several views these layoffs as obligatory on the road to success. Ikigai’s CIO, Travis Kling, made a statement before Bitcoin rallying again, presenting his perspective. According to Kling, the industry requires collapses of exchanges, severe regulation, many more layoffs, and most certainly ‘cries of Crypto being dead.’
