Crypto Winter Will Last ‘At Least Another Year,’ Says Founder of Crypto Firm Who Just Laid Off 40% of Its Workforce

[ad_1]

Source: AdobeStock / Alexei

Octopus Network, a multi-chain crypto network built on the NEAR protocol, has laid off around 40% of the core team and cut the salaries of the rest due to the ongoing crypto winter – a cold snap that won’t end until at least less than a year, argued project founder Louis Liu.

The string of companies announcing layoffs across the crypto world, citing the prolonged sour market conditions, is only getting longer.

Among the latest is Octopus Network which announced a set of restructuring measures and what it called the “voluntary separation program”. Under this program, 12 of the 30 core team members would leave the project and receive “appropriate compensation”.

And that’s not all the cuts they make. The announcement written by the founder of the project stated that,

“The remaining team members will take a 20% pay cut and the team’s token incentive will be suspended indefinitely.”

The move was necessary as Web3 businesses are set to be hit by a strong crypto winter blow, the announcement suggested. He said that Octopus Network was designed to support Web3 applications by providing an on-demand appchain infrastructure – the operational cost of which is higher than a smart contract on a shared layer 1 blockchain.

Therefore, Liu wrote that,

“Because it takes a lot of resources to support a chain of applications in terms of IT infrastructure and community spirit sharing, the Octopus community cannot afford to integrate a lot of chains applications to lose most of them in a year. That’s why I decided to revise the strategy of Octopus.”

The NEAR blockchain and the inter-blockchain communication protocol (IBC) are “the two cornerstones” of the new strategy, he said, with the goal being for the Octopus network to survive the crypto winter. IBC is a protocol designed to handle authentication and data transport between two blockchains. It was launched in April 2021 as the Cosmos blockchain standard for blockchain interoperability.

The Octopus team said they are set to extend IBC to blockchains that are not Cosmos-SDK based, while Octopus 2.0 “will facilitate NEAR’s position as an inherent part of the blockchain Internet by widely connecting various appchains (based on Substrate or Cosmos SDK) and all IBC compatible blockchains.”

Get ready for a long crypto winter

Liu said it’s all part of the “core team refactoring,” which is necessary because the team is “embracing[s] a refined project strategy to adapt to market conditions.”

We are currently in the bear market, and it is likely to last for some time to come, the announcement said, as the future will bring some changes to the sector – especially as the sector itself is expanding, welcoming traditional financial institutions, and itself becoming part of global capital markets, albeit the riskiest and most volatile part, Liu said.

Several things are likely to happen over the next few years, one being that the macrocycle will replace Bitcoin’s halving cycle as the dominant force in the crypto asset market, Liu said.

That said, predictions are difficult,

“But most people will agree: the capital market will return to risk-taking at a slow pace, which means the crypto winter will last at least another year, possibly much longer. Web3 startups will not survive,” Liu wrote.

He then advised “regular people” who are considering starting a Web3 startup not to do so unless they have the backing of large institutional investors.

The founder added that the next community call will be on January 8, during which he will answer questions, including those regarding the “refactoring” and Octopus 2.0.

Meanwhile, as reported recently, Singapore-based crypto trading firm Amber Group has decided to lay off 40% of its workforce and end its retail operations, citing the market downturn. He also ended a $25 million sponsorship deal with football club Chelsea FC.

Koinly, a crypto tax reporting platform, laid off 14% of its team, citing “the deepening bear market”, while in an exclusive for Cryptonews.com, several employees claimed the cuts were affecting more people and had been done in an unprofessional manner with poor communication.

Among many others, crypto exchange ByBit cut its workforce by 30%, while non-fungible token (NFT) platform Candy Digital laid off a third of the company’s roughly 100 employees.

____

Read more: – Most of FTX’s legal team leaving as Exchange crashes – Billionaire Mike Novogratz could cut 20% of Galaxy Digital’s workforce – Signs of a bear market?

– Blockchain.Com Layoffs – Stepn Allegedly Laid Off 100 Employees Amid Market Slowdown, Company Denies

– Huobi Crypto Exchange denies mass layoffs and executive resignations – Coinbase layoffs ‘part of larger trend’ in crypto industry

[ad_2]