Matrixport Joins Growing List of Crypto and Blockchain Companies Letting Employees Go

January 28, 2023 Bitcoin.com

ConsenSys slashes headcount 11% as chief economist reveals formula for adoption

January 19, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Adoption

ConsenSys CEO Joseph Lubin confirmed the company would be cutting 96 of its staff to focus its resources on its core businesses.

ConsenSys, the parent company behind MetaMask, is letting go of 11% of its workforce, with CEO Joseph Lubin blaming “uncertain market conditions” brought on by recent collapses.

In a blog post from ConsenSys CEO Joseph Lubin on Jan. 18, the blockchain firm CEO said “poorly behaved” centralized finance (CeFi) actors have cast a “broad pall on our ecosystem that we will all need to work through.”

Lubin said the decision will impact 96 employees and is part of plans to focus its resources on its core businesses.

Today we need to make the extremely difficult decision to streamline some of ConsenSys’ teams to adjust to challenging and uncertain market conditions.https://t.co/Svuk9yYj6J

1/10
— Joseph Lubin (@ethereumJoseph) January 18, 2023

Speaking to Cointelegraph a few days before the layoffs were officially announced — though they had already been widely reported — Lex Sokolin, the chief cryptoeconomics officer of ConsenSys said that the industry was still far from mass adoption globally.

“We're still in a place where this is emerging technology. It’s not entirely well understood by the whole public,” he said.

According to Consensys, during the last bull run, over 30 million users each month were using MetaMask to access DeFi protocols, mint and trade NFTs and participate in DAOs. While promising, that’s a drop in the ocean globally.

“MetaMask has 30 million monthly users and in Web3, there are maybe 500 million addresses,” Sokolin said. “But that’s not five billion people.”

Asked when crypto will see mainstream adoption, Sokolin said it was all about having enough compelling use cases for crypto, as well as a thriving ecosystem to support it.

*Lex Sokolin, Chief Cryptoeconomist, ConsenSys Source: Lexsokolin.com*

He also rejected the idea that it will come as a result of better user experience and clearer regulations.

“They're not the things that people say [such as] ‘when is UI going to be better’, or ‘when is regulation going to make it better.’ Those are important, but [...] they're not the catalyst,” said Sokolin adding:

“The catalyst of things is, one: Is there going to be enough stuff to buy on Web3 that I want to own?”

“If I live in Web3 and my avatar and my social media and my data and my status as a person, prestige, community belonging [...] is tied to me owning digital objects [...] you're gonna inevitably get to a place where everyone wants to be doing commercial transactions in Web3.”

“So for me, economic adoption is the most important thing. Because it's going to pull the rest of it into the ecosystem.”

In his latest post, Lubin said the company will be focused on streaming its workforce and focusing its business on core value drivers, including end-user custody solution MetaMask, developer platform Infura, and “new offerings” that grow Web3 commerce and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) communities.

Huobi Korea Plans to Cut Ties With Parent Company, Strengthen Domestic Presence

January 9, 2023 Bitcoin.com

FTX ex-staffer: Extravagant expenditures and cult-like worshipping of SBF

December 15, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Bankman-Fried

A former FTX employee has revealed details regarding the lavish expenditures of the exchange as well as its intense company culture.

A former employee of crypto exchange FTX has seemingly exposed the company’s excessive luxury expenditures, obsessive workplace culture and grueling work hours leading to the hiring of a company psychiatrist in the year before its collapse.

Danielle Cloud, a former employee of FTX claiming to work in the marketing department, posted a series of Tweets on Dec. 13 saying FTX employed her in Oct. 2021 before she resigned roughly two weeks ago.

1. My ex - FTX

Two(ish) weeks ago, I formally resigned from my position as an FTX employee.
— Dani Cloud (@daniiicloud) December 13, 2022

“Things felt off. Cult-like,” Cloud wrote, describing the feeling when she first joined the exchange and comparing it to fraudulent ventures such as the luxury music festival Fyre Festival and health technology company Theranos.

She claimed to have “never heard of” FTX or its founder Sam Bankman-Fried but said “everyone employed at FTX was obsessed” with him.

“I supposed it made sense. The kid was young, the principles were revolutionary, the ideas were golden [...] who was I to challenge that?”

*Cloud (front row, center left) pictured with other FTX US employees in Feb. 2022. Image: FTX US President Brett Harrison's* *Twitter*

Cloud claimed the “best way” to land a role at FTX was to “be the female spouse of an existing employee” who could apparently within “a month or two” make their way into an executive position.

“Those who challenged it were churned,” she claimed.

Time off from work was also a “joke” according to Cloud. “The work week was Monday to Sunday,” she said and a coworker was “chewed out” for asking if the company had time off for Thanksgiving.

*Cloud with an unknown person at SALT’s Crypto Bahamas conference in May. The event was co-hosted by FTX. Image: Instagram*

Cloud started as a Know Your Customer (KYC) analyst at FTX US, the company’s United States arm, and was promoted to a full-time marketing role in May 2022 — a position that required her “to work out of the Bahamas majority of the time.”

FTX’s excess luxury expenditures

“The entire operation was iconically and moronically inefficient,” Cloud said regarding the exchange's headquarters in the Bahamas, “I never knew all the things money could buy.”

She claimed FTX either purchased or rented multimillion-dollar homes for its executives who threw lavish house parties and had private chefs.

11. The half dozen condos leased/purchased by FTX for free employee access... In addition to the expensed stays in luxury hotels. pic.twitter.com/RqCVfjm7eX
— Dani Cloud (@daniiicloud) December 14, 2022

Employees were provided “expensed stays in luxury hotels” in addition to access to the “half dozen condos” rented or bought by the company.

FTX’s Bahamian office had “food catered 24/7” with employee perks purported to include free groceries, a monthly pop-up barber and fortnightly massages.

*A still from a video taken by Cloud depicting an FTX work party at the Albany resort in the Bahamas. Bankman-Fried was known to reside at the location. Image: Instagram*

The Commodities Future Trading Commission (CFTC) on Dec. 13 filed a lawsuit against Bankman-Fried claiming he used FTX customer funds for luxury real estate purchases.

FTX reportedly spent over $250 million on real estate purchases buying 35 properties in the Bahamas as per a Dec. 13 report from CNBC.

Why a shrink was brought into FTX

Due to the high workload demands, Cloud said Bankman-Fried brought in a psychiatrist, Dr. George K. Lerner.

A now-deleted profile on Bankman-Fried written in September by venture firm Sequoia Capital described Lerner as “the person who knows [Bankman-Fried] the best” and “the FTX company therapist.”

Cloud said Lerner was “propositioned as a coach” there to consult on business growth and was said to be “critical” to FTX employee satisfaction and its retention strategy, but alleged Lerner asked her intimate questions about her relationship with her fiancé.

She also claimed administration staff were “pushed to illegally ship prescriptions to Nassau” which were written in California and Florida.

In a Dec. 13 congressional hearing FTX’s CEO John Ray said there was “no record keeping whatsoever” at the company, and many invoices and expense receipts were submitted through the messaging app Slack.

FTX also used the accounting software Quickbooks according to Ray who said he has “nothing against Quickbooks” but it’s not a tool “for a multi-billion-dollar company.”