Crypto exchange Luno announces job cuts affecting 35% of employees

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Fox News Senior Congressional Correspondent Chad Pergram reports from Capitol Hill, where crypto is largely unregulated.

Luno, a cryptocurrency exchange owned by Digital Currency Group, announced a major round of job cuts on Wednesday.

The layoffs will affect 35% of Luno’s total workforce, CEO Marcus Swanepoel announced in a post on the crypto exchange’s website. They come after what Swanepoel described as “an incredibly difficult year for the tech industry at large and the crypto market in particular.”

Over the past year, some popular cryptocurrencies have seen their prices drop sharply. Bitcoin, for example, is down nearly 39% in the past 12 months, while Ethereum and Solana are down around 37% and 74%, respectively.

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The “turbulence” has, according to Swanepoel, affected Luno’s “overall growth and revenue figures”, prompting layoffs and other measures.

He pointed to a “number of unforeseen and very extreme events,” including a “global economic downturn,” an “even deeper downturn in the tech sector as a whole,” a “crypto winter,” and recent events in the crypto industry that have hurt him. . One of the “shocks” was the recent and rapid collapse of the FTX exchange.

Representations of cryptocurrencies are visible in this illustration. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File/Reuters Photos)

FTX has been engaged in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings since filing for it a few months ago. Regarding the company and its sudden collapse, founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has since been hit with a host of criminal charges to which he has pleaded not guilty.

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Such events “in turn [have] indirectly affected us in a number of ways: on the capital side, a much more constrained funding environment, with market focus shifting from long-term investment to short-term profitability, and on the operational side, a negative impact on market sentiment and, therefore, on the growth and revenue of our business, as well as all of our peers and competitors,” Swanepoel told employees.

Luno’s customers and operations were not affected, according to the CEO.

Cryptocurrency mixing platform Tornado Cash has been hit with US sanctions over money laundering allegations. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File/Reuters)

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Other companies in the industry recently announced downsizing after a turbulent year for crypto.

Crypto.com revealed plans to cut 20% of its employees in mid-January. Earlier this month, Coinbase said 20% of its employees would be laid off.

At the end of November, Kraken cut around 1,100 jobs.

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