n Henry Kravis is investing in a new investment firm in San Francisco aimed at providing blockchain and cryptocurrency investment servicesn
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Report Canadian Crypto Exchange Coinsquare Lays Off 40 Employees
n One of Canadas top crypto exchanges, Coinsquare, is reportedly laying off almost 30 percent off its staff, including its CFO and COOn
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Bitwage Service Enables US Companies to Pay W2 Employees and Payroll Taxes Using Crypto
The post Bitwage Service Enables US Companies to Pay W2 Employees and Payroll Taxes Using Crypto appeared first on DCEBrief.
South Korea Regulators Indict Three Upbit Employees for Alleged Trade Volume Manipulation
n No manipulation here, says exchange Upbit after South Korean authorities issue indictment against three employeesn
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PayPal Launches Blockchain-Based Innovation Reward System for Employees
n PayPals innovation lab based in San Jose has launched a blockchain-based token program that rewards innovationn
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Crypto Bear Market Has Even Led $15 Billion Bitmain to Lay Off Employees
The ongoing bear market has begun to take its toll on a number of businesses, as many seek to close up operations, reduce staff, or make other changes that impact their ability to stay afloat. The latest cryptocurrency firm to feel pressure due to continued price decline, is the billion-valued mining giant Bitmain.
Bitmain Closes Israeli Dev Center Due to Crypto “Shake Up”
After a mere two years in operation, Bitmain will be shutting down its development center in Ra’anana, Israel, citing continued turmoil and uncertainty in the cryptocurrency market.
“The crypto market has undergone a shake-up in the past few months, which has forced Bitmain to examine its various activities around the globe and to refocus its business in accordance with the current situation,” said Bitmain VP International Sales and Marketing Gadi Glikberg who also serves as the Branch Manager at Bitmain’s Israeli development center.
Related Reading | Bitmain Restructures Leadership Board Positions Ahead of IPO
According to Globes Israel, the Ra’anana office has 23 employees who will be laid off in the process. Glikberg himself is also leaving the company in the wake of the closure.
Back in September, before Bitcoin’s price broke through the critical support floor of ,000 and plummeted yet another 40% from previous 2018 lows, Glikberg appeared unfazed, suggesting that the “market will find a way to perfect itself” when discussing the influence falling prices had on sales of Bitmain’s Antminer ASIC miners. In the same interview, Glikberg revealed that he had aimed to expand his team to up to 30 employees before the year’s end and was anticipating growth into 2019. However, the tides have turned and many business have been forced to either shut down, or alter their business operations significantly to remain competitive in the current market climate.
ConsenSys and Coinbase: Other Crypto Giants Struggling to Survive
It’s not just Bitamin that is suffering amidst the current downtrend in cryptocurrencies. This past week, blockchain innovation firm ConsenSys laid off over 13% of its 1,200 employees in a major restructuring the company is calling ConsenSys 2.0. The company’s founder Joseph Lubin, who also helped co-found Ethereum, said the the market was extremely “competitive” and the company would need to “retain, and in some cases regain, the lean and gritty startup mindset that made us who we are.”
Related Reading | ConsenSys CEO is Planning Company Restructure Following Bear Market
Coinbase, who generated a whopping billion in revenue during 2017’s bull market, also laid off nearly 3% of its workforce this past October. It’s especially surprising for Coinbase to be dropping employees as the firm’s CEO Brian Armstrong has said that bear markets are a time to “build a strong foundation so we can thrive in the next growth cycle.” The company was also recently valued at billion after a successful 0 million round of investment.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Steemit Announces Structural Reorganization, Laying of 70% of Employees
The decentralized content platform that rewards content providers with cryptocurrency, Steemit, recently announced a corporate restructuring that will result in a significant amount of their workforce being cut.
The announcement, which was made by the company’s CEO in a recent post, explained that the weakness of the cryptocurrency markets has affected both the company’s cryptocurrency (STEEM) and the company’s user-base, forcing them to layoff close to 70% of their employees.
Ned Scott, the founder and CEO of Steemit, explained the restructuring, saying:
“Given the weakness of the cryptocurrency market, the fiat returns on our automated selling of STEEM diminishing, and the growing costs of running full Steem nodes, we have been forced to layoff close to 70% of the team.”
Related Reading: Crypto Rally Runs Out of Steam But Steem Is Green
Steemit Cryptocurrency Down 95% from All-Time-Highs
Steemit’s cryptocurrency has been hit hard by the recent market downturn and is currently trading down approximately 95% from its all-time-highs of .28 that were established in early-2018. At the time of writing, STEEM is trading at nearly .40, up 11% over the past 24-hour trading period.
Earlier this week, STEEM set a fresh 2018 low at .30, from which it has gradually recovered. Yesterday, STEEM temporarily skyrocketed to .55 before quickly crashing back to .35. Its recent decline has led its market cap down from highs of .8 billion to lows of million.
Scott further noted that the remaining team will place their focus on reducing the costs of Steemit’s existing infrastructure in an effort to free up funding for other initiatives and platform improvements.
“The remainder of the team is staying on to focus primarily on reducing the costs of the infrastructure running steemit.com and our public APIs, and ensuring that the community can remain informed of developments… We have conducted our first all-hands meeting and are prioritizing all the cost reduction solutions we can accomplish in the near term, including replacing steemd plugins with hivemind, pitchforking Steem to prune the chain state size from 160gb to 0gb, AWS usage projections, DevOps solutions, reduction of Staging and Testing nodes, and eliminating redundancies.”
Although Steemit’s current situation looks dire, Scott reaffirmed his commitment to the cryptocurrency industry, noting that he still believes that the markets have tremendous potential and that Steemit could still one day rival popular applications including Instagram and Reddit.
Steem is not alone in its operation being affected by the recent cryptocurrency downturn. Blockchain media platform Civil was recently forced to refund buyers of its ICO token (CVL) due to failing to attract interest in their token-based platform from the media industry.
Matthew Iles, Civil’s CEO, discussed the company’s struggling efforts to gain both users and investors, saying:
“This isn’t how we saw this going. The numbers will show clearly enough that we are not where we wanted to be at this point in the sale when we started out.”
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Coinbase CEO Tells New Employees ‘Don’t Panic’ Over Bitcoin Price
When Brian Armstrong founded Coinbase in 2012 Bitcoin was worth around and existed in relative obscurity. Those who had heard about this digital money or even the word cryptocurrency probably did so through a news brief about the dark web. Those who were trading in it already were a very select few.
Coinbase CEO Tweets Words of Wisdom to Staff
Then came a series of price bubbles which eventually rocketed the price to nearly ,000 and saw the crypto space grow exponentially in just a few months in late 2017. That market corrected, the price fell to about a third of its all-time high value where it languishes today at about ,600, and those who came in late are wondering if they are ever going to see their initial investment comeback, never mind a profit.
Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange that recently self-evaluated its worth at billion, had a word of advice to new employees who might be getting the jitters as the price of Bitcoin remains low. Actually, it was more than a word, it was a 10 part twitter thread giving a mini-history on the price of Bitcoin since its launch but the take away was don’t panic, I have seen this before.
When Bitcoin surged in 2017 so did Coinbase’s user numbers and trading volume which stimulated the company’s growth. They went from 250 to 500 employees, many who presumably walked away from solid jobs in the tech world to get into the volatile space of cryptocurrency and who maybe now thinking twice about that decision.
In his tweets, Armstrong strove to reassure those new to the game that he had seen bubbles before and that by focusing on doing the work they would rise above the hype. One tweet measured the space as only a crypto player would, as Armstrong wrote,
“When there is hype, people are irrationally exuberant. When there is despair, people are irrationally pessimistic. Neither is true, reality is always somewhere in the middle, more correlated with real usage (transactions per day) than the price.”
Don’t Panic
Coinbase ran into its own problems as it grew to meet user demand. Suffering from systems outages and customer service problems but Armstrong told his team that this is the time to improve.
6/ We use the down cycles to build a strong foundation so we can thrive in the next growth cycle.
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) June 19, 2018
Through the twitter thread he tried to put the recent boom and correction into long-term perspective by comparing it with the less dramatic but still considerable price spikes of 2013 and 2014, writing that; “It can be scary the first time you see it, but to us who have been in the industry for many years, it feels like old news,”
Image from Shutterstock
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