The world’s largest digital asset exchange by trade volume announced intentions to boost its personnel this year despite the ongoing crypto layoffs.
At the Crypto Finance Conference on Wednesday in Switzerland, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced that the business intends to boost its personnel by 15% to 30% in 2023.
According to CNBC, the CEO stated that Binance expects to be “well-organized” before the next bull market in cryptocurrencies and acknowledged that the exchange is “not particularly efficient.” The representative made no more comments.
One day after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a blog post that the company would be letting go of 950 more employees, Zhao made his remarks.
Nine months ago, Coinbase let go of 18% of its workforce or about 1,100 individuals. The most recent layoffs at Coinbase result in a further 20% headcount reduction.
In a filing, Coinbase stated that the personnel decrease anticipates a total restructuring charge of between $149 million and $163 million in the first quarter of 2023.
This week, Coinbase wasn’t the only exchange to lay off employees.
In a blog post published on Friday, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek stated the company had 20% fewer employees as it dealt with “ongoing economic headwinds and unexpected market occurrences.”
The corporation cut roughly 260 employees last year, or 5% of its staff; the layoffs occurred about six months later.
The adjustments we took in July gave us the ability to weather the macroeconomic slump. Still, Marszalek noted that they should have taken into consideration the subsequent collapse of FTX, which gravely undermined industry confidence.
Marszalek’s statement was sent shortly after CoinDesk reported that 110 employees, or 28% of the company’s workforce, would be let go by Blockchain.com. A spokeswoman for Blockchain.com declined to comment.
The company apparently lost access to troubled cryptocurrency hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and reduced its employees by 25% in July. About six weeks later, its CEO, Peter Smith, informed Blockworks that the crypto ecosystem had entered the “despair” stage of the bear market.
Former eToro and Tinder execs join crypto space.
Trezor, a maker of hardware wallets for cryptocurrencies, named Matj Tak as its new CEO.
Marek Palatinus, a co-founder of Trezor who will no longer serve as CEO, will continue to work for the company as an adviser.
ák began working with Trezor in 2019 as a product manager before being elevated to the position of chief product officer in 2021.
His most recent appointment comes as Trezor announced a 300% increase in sales as some investors turned to self-custody assets in the wake of the FTX meltdown. The business stated that it anticipates the growth in new consumers to continue till 2023.
Guy Hirsch was hired by the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken to manage the firm’s growth in the United States and Canada.
Hirsch will be responsible for communicating with regional authorities, institutions, and retail clients. In spite of the bear market, he indicated in a statement that he would try to “shepherd” Kraken’s new licencing and regulatory activities.
The executive formerly oversaw eToro’s US operations and had positions in Samsung’s innovation strategy.
Samia Bayou, a former executive at BlockFi, joined Kraken as the exchange’s head of prime finance and OTC sales across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa the same week the news broke.
From May 2021 to September 2022, Bayou served as BlockFi’s worldwide head of its private client division. She announced the shift on Friday in a LinkedIn post.
Blockchain game company N3twork Studios have hired the former chief product officer of Tinder to serve as its new COO.
Josh Sell will work with the business to create the upcoming Web3 role-playing games Triumph and Legendary: Heroes Unchained.
Sell held a comparable product leadership position at Glu Mobile before joining Tinder in July 2020, where he oversaw the creation of the well-known Deer Hunter series. According to his LinkedIn profile, he co-founded Web3 game startup Midnight after quitting Tinder in January.
One-time Meta exec joins crypto identity startup.
A platform for crypto as a service William Klippel has been appointed as the head of investment platforms at Zero Hash.
According to the company, Zero Hash’s turnkey solution handles backend complexity and regulatory licencing necessary to supply crypto products. In January 2022, the company completed a Series D fundraising round, raising $105 million.
Klippel worked for GAIN Capital, a foreign exchange company, for almost 15 years. In this position, he designed and launched the company’s foreign exchange and cryptocurrency products. He left the company as the commercial head of the Direct Market Access product range.
As managing director of digital identity, former Meta executive Viktoria Ruubel has joined the identity verification service company Veriff.
Veriff, which teamed up with Blockchain.com in 2018, provides crypto consumers with various fraud prevention and verification services.
Rubel joins the organization after serving as senior vice president of business services for Tide Platform, a financial platform for small businesses with headquarters in the UK.
Rubel formerly worked for Facebook (now Meta) for a year as the organization’s director of platforms for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Later, she took a position as director of product for Europe at software giant Intuit.