Filecoin Creator Protocol Labs Announces Layoffs Amid Crypto Winter and Economic Downturn

Protocol Labs CEO Juan Benet published a blog post on Friday announcing that 21% of the company’s staff will be laid off. Protocol Labs is the creator of the blockchain network Filecoin. Benet emphasized in the blog post that it has been an “extremely challenging economic downturn, worldwide, and especially in the crypto industry.”

Protocol Labs, the company behind the file storage blockchain network Filecoin, announced on Feb. 3 that it will lay off a number of employees. CEO Juan Benet wrote a blog post, titled “Focusing Our Strategy to Weather Crypto Winter,” to explain the layoffs. He cited the “extremely challenging economic downturn” as hitting the crypto industry particularly hard. “The macro winter worsened crypto winter, making it more extreme and potentially longer than our industry expected,” Benet wrote.

“Although we worked extremely hard to avoid this, we’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by 89 roles (approximately 21%),” the blog post details. “This impacts individuals across PLGO teams (PL Corp, PL Member Services, Network Goods, PL Outercore, and PL Starfleet). We’ve had to focus our headcount against the most impactful and business critical efforts.”

Protocol Labs has joined the list of crypto industry businesses that have laid off employees during the “crypto winter.” Other cryptocurrency and blockchain-focused companies, such as Candy Digital, Blockchain.com, Opensea, Huobi, and Gemini, have also cut staff. The industry-wide layoffs began to pick up momentum last year and have continued into 2023. In his Friday blog post, Benet noted that the “changes will be tough for all Labbers” and the company will host a “PLGO All Hands” meeting on Monday to answer any remaining questions.

Filecoin’s native cryptocurrency, FIL, is currently ranked #35 in the crypto economy based on market capitalization. As of Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023, filecoin’s (FIL) market valuation was approximately $2.11 billion, with global trade volume of about $136 million in the last 24 hours. FIL has gained 65.7% against the U.S. dollar in the past 30 days and outperformed leading cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH). Despite the 65.7% increase, FIL is still down more than 97% from its all-time high of $236 per coin, which was reached on April 1, 2021. At 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Feb. 4, 2023, FIL was trading for $5.59 per unit.

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