Kraken Cuts Headcount Amid Crypto Exodus
Date: 2024-10-31 Author: Oliver Abernathy Categories: BUSINESS
This week, Kraken joined a number of other crypto companies, such as Consensys and dYdX, in cutting their headcount. As part of the structural changes, the San Francisco-based company appointed a new co-CEO, Tribe Capital co-founder Arjun Sethi, and said it was making “decisions to optimize the organization” amid current challenges.
While the New York Times reporter Mike Isaac did not specify which positions were affected by the layoffs, Kraken press releases and social media discussions indicate that the layoffs were mostly at the executive and management levels. According to the company, some of the organizational structure was hindering the development of initiatives by team leaders.
We must focus our best people on building, not managing. This means empowering our leaders to build best-in-class products, use data to make better decisions for customers, and hold engineering, product, and design teams accountable for the end result.
Kraken Statement
In addition to Kraken, several other major crypto players have cut staff. Consensys, the developer of MetaMask and the Ethereum infrastructure, has cut its staff by 20%, with CEO Joe Lubin citing regulatory tightening and macroeconomic factors as reasons.
Dextermination exchange dYdX has also cut 35% of its staff just two weeks after CEO Antonio Giuliano returned. Several key employees were also laid off.
The previous wave of layoffs at Kraken occurred in 2022, when the exchange was also forced to cut about 30% of its staff (approximately 1,100 people). This was due to the fall in the value of Bitcoin and financial turmoil in the industry, such as the high-profile collapse of FTX.
