Worse than June’s cuts.
Singapore-based Crypto.com laid off 5% off it’s workforce in June. The company stated that the bear market was to blame. The rest of the employees left after that cut were told their jobs were secure- this has turned out not to be the case.
As reported by the Verge in a recent article, sources inside of the company flat out stated “they lied”. According to the source the company had a quarterly “all hands” call in which they decided to let employees know of the additional layoffs.The identity of the source was confirmed by Decrypt and has been kept anonymous for safety.
Unlike the last announcement of layoffs this announcement was not made to the public instead it was kept in-house. The leadership of Crypto.com also stated that they had no intention of going public with the information about the layoffs, this probably would be due to wanting to not be embarrassed or be seen as going against their words from June.
The source was not allowed to give too many details due to company policies but stated that the amount of workers laid off was far larger than that of June.This round of layoffs was more serious as more essential personnel such as those that worked on the exchange, the wallet, and the app. The last set of layoffs was conducted against staff like customer service.
When contacted about the layoffs a spokesperson for Crypto.com offered a very corporate response:
“We announced reductions in June and since that time we have optimized our workforce to align with current external economic headwinds, We have a strong balance sheet and Will continue to invest in product engineering,and brand partnerships moving forward”
There are some who state this is a very fancy way of saying “ we got rid of more people due to this bear market hitting our bottom line harder and we would definitely welcome some companies joining us for more collaborations.”
The June cuts came with the company stating they would resume hiring when they found a need for more workers. Crypto.com recently announced it will be the first crypto exchange to operate in Canada with the new regulatory scheme. The company seems to be cutting as much as it can to survive this bear market and this comes directly after 1300 new staff were hired from late 2021 to early 2022.
On Glassdoor one user stated the cuts were at 1000. CEO of Crypto.com Kris Marszalek has refused to release the exact number of employees let go currently. In a recent employee-only “town hall” meeting he made the following statement:
“I want you to understand this is a private company , and we don’t have to follow the public US company playbook, there doesn’t have to be an announcement, there doesn’t have to be a blog post. Of course everybody is always interested in a number, a number makes a great headline, its a great thing to gossip about,as co-workers of this company, you should ask yourself, is it in my interests for this number to be out there? And I’ll leave it at that “
The response did not go well with the employees as some felt as if they didn’t have strong leadership saying that the response just felt like they were being told to “shut up and keep working.”Many employees felt insulted and were very unhappy with the results. This lack of communication and support has led to massive confusion about the state of the crypto exchange company with employees unable to properly dictate the amount of coworkers they have or the exact tools they have to do so.
Currently Crypto.com has still refused to give any comment on what is going on to fellow reports that have reached out such as the Verge and Decrypt. The situation is still ongoing.