Binance Forecasts 15-30% Hiring Surge in 2023 Even as Rivals Cut Jobs

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Zhao Changpeng, founder and CEO of Binance, attends a conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 16, 2022.

Benoit Tessier | Reuters

Binance predicts a wave of hiring in 2023, CEO Changpeng Zhao said Wednesday, taking a somewhat contrarian view as crypto firms lay off huge workforces amid continued pressure on commodity prices. rooms.

Zhao said Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said the company had increased the number of employees in 2022 from 3,000 people to “almost” 8,000.

In 2023, Binance plans to increase the number of employees by 15-30%, Zhao said at the Crypto Finance Conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

Rival exchanges were forced to cut large chunks of their workforces after nearly $1.4 trillion was wiped from the crypto market in 2022 and major digital currencies including bitcoin and ether slumped. saw their prices fall.

In November, Kraken announced it was laying off 30% of its staff, and this year Huobi and Coinbase announced they would be laying off 20% of their workforce. This was the second round of job cuts for Coinbase last year.

Zhao said Binance needs to “organize the business well” ahead of the next crypto bull run and admitted the exchange is “not super efficient.”

“We will continue to build and hopefully we will pick up before the next bull market,” Zhao said.

Last year, the industry was plagued by the collapse of major projects, liquidity issues, bankruptcies and the highly publicized failure of crypto exchange FTX. Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded FTX, has been charged with eight counts by US prosecutors, including fraud. He pleaded not guilty.

Binance had a big role to play in the collapse of FTX. In November, Binance offered to buy FTX’s non-US business which was facing liquidity issues, but later backed out of the deal. Zhao has publicly stated that his company is selling its holdings in FTX’s native token, FTT, which has exacerbated the collapse of this digital coin, adding to FTX’s downward spiral.

Zhao said he “didn’t plan” for FTX’s collapse.

In response to a question from CNBC on the sidelines of the CFC St Moritz conference, the CEO of Binance said that “the real damage is not that high” on the crypto industry from the collapse of FTX. He said that FTX “are not a big player, they just make a lot of noise”.

“There is definitely damage [but] the industry will be fine,” Zhao said.

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