By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 24th, 2024
Following the recent news about Bitmain and ConsenSys, another cryptocurrency giant, Huobi, has announced its plans for reducing the company’s staff.
Following the latest news about Bitmain, the world’s largest manufacturer of ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining, which has declared its laying off half of the company’s staff earlier this day, another cryptocurrency giant, Huobi has recently announced that it is also going for cutting off redundant employees, but for different reasons.
According to Bitmain, its operations across mining and blockchain development have been stopped mostly for the reason of the company’s running out of money. So, Bitmain’s layoffs will likely occur across all divisions, but those working on newer investments like artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies are expected to be impacted most.
Unlike Bitmain, Chinese company Huobi Group, which SCMP notes have over 1,000 employees, has underlined that the company is not going to stop expanding its team for the core businesses and emerging markets. Huobi will cut off its worst-performing employees, but will also continue hiring people to promote the company’s major directions.
Founded in 2013 in China, Huobi is the world’s leading digital asset trading platform and currently offers trading and investment in more than 100 digital asset pairs. The company has offices in Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and the United States. In August 2018 it became a publically listed Hong Kong company.
Following a 2017 ban on Bitcoin exchanges by the Chinese government, Huobi stopped Bitcoin withdrawals and shut down its Chinese website, but continued operating overseas as “Huobi Pro”, a Seychelles-registered company. Huobi China continues to operate as a blockchain consulting and research platform.
Previously to Bitmain and Huobi, the similar news came from Ethereum production studio ConsenSys earlier this month. The company also underwent a form of restructuring, cutting off 60% of its staff aiming to return back its startup mindset in order to withstand in such hard times for cryptocurrency market as can be currently observed in the whole industry.
The bear market of 2018, which stroke in the last few months, has already resulted in many of the biggest companies going bankrupt. Significant decreases in the industry are not expected to stop in the next few months as well, as the total market cap of the industry has already dropped over $500 billion since January 2018. But according to some specialists, downsizing is a natural cycle in new, rapid growth industries, and unfortunately blockchain is no exception.