MetaMask’s Parent Company, ConsenSys, Announces Intent on Cutting Off 11% of its Staff

MetaMask’s parent company, ConsenSys, has unfortunately joined the trend of companies letting go of a percentage of their workforce, and they have decided to let go of a notable 11% of their workforce, which amounts to 96 people. 

The CEO of the blockchain firm, Joseph Lubin, blamed the move on the recent harsh times the blockchain market is currently facing and an attempt to stay afloat during these market conditions brought back the recent collapses of crypto giants and other smaller infrastructures that kept the market running smoothly. The CEO recently stated in a blog post that poorly behaved centralized finance actors had unfortunately pulled a broad pall on the crypto ecosystem that everyone else has to work through. The decision was made as a part of ConsenSys’s plans to focus its resources on the core of the business to reduce the flow of funds into different directions and to focus more on specific areas. 

The chief cryptoeconomics office at ConsenSys, in an interview with Cointelegraph just a few days before the crypto firm announced their intentions to off workers, had said that he believed the industry had yet to get to a place of mass adoption fully. Crypto is inadvertently still a new technology that has yet to gain complete understanding from the general public, and it is still well on its way to getting that.

According to the company, over 30 million users each month during their last bull run were found to have been using MetaMask to access DeFi protocols, mint and trade non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and participate in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Still, the company also said it was just a tiny part of the global domination the blockchain space could see in the future when it experiences international mass adoption. While MetaMask may have 30 million users monthly on web three and a whopping 500 million user addresses, it is far from the billions of people worldwide. Crypto ultimately going global will see a recording of billions of people signed under these crypto firms.

One primary reason why crypto may have yet to achieve global consumption can be attributed to the lack of compelling use cases for cryptocurrencies in the global market and a thriving economy that would welcome it. Fortunately for the crypto market, some funding has been put towards creating innovations that push for more real use cases in the crypto and global market, which will, in turn, drag another demographic into the crypto market. For cryptocurrency, the catalyst of things to focus on does web 3 have enough things that individuals would want to own if they were ready to buy, hence the need for more compelling use cases. There have to be more innovations created that cater to daily needs and activities. Economic adoption has to happen in the crypto space for everything else to be pulled into the ecosystem. 

ConsenSys announced that their primary focus now will be on streaming their remaining workforce and keeping the focus on the business through core value drivers, with the inclusion of end-user custody solution MetaMask and developer platform Infura and other new offerings that will add to the growth of Web 3 commerce and DAO communities. 

In the last few months, more crypto firms than expected took the path of laying off workers and not just a handful but a notable percentage, with the lowest being 5%. Companies like Kraken, Gemini, and even Coinbase have been forced to let go of a portion of their workforce to ensure that the company remains afloat in the difficult circumstances surrounding the market and to further focus on developing their strong business suits. While other companies have also been forced to close down their business or had to file for bankruptcy, the path of laying off workers to reduce expenses and also reduce the outflow of money is a better option for keeping crypto firms standing, rather than completely shutting them down due to an inability to keep them running at all and still incurring debts over it. 

Conclusion

While most of the troubles facing the crypto space currently could be attributed to the bearish market trend, another huge responsibility would have to be placed on FTX for weakening the market even further as the collapse and file for bankruptcy of the former crypto giant had a significant effect on the market, dragging down companies exposed to it down the chain and causing utter chaos which the market is just now recovering from slowly, after months of harsh crypto winters and a few months after FTX collapse.