OCTOBER 29, 2024 — 160 EMPLOYEES
The company has announced a 20% reduction in force company-wide, or 160 employees.
According to Founder and CEO Joe Lubin,
“The broader macroeconomic conditions over the past year and ongoing regulatory uncertainty have created broad challenges for our industry, especially for US-based companies.
Even in the face of these challenges, our ecosystem is on the precipice of becoming a globally systemically defining force, with web3-native companies making great strides and more traditional companies leaning into web3.
To stay competitive, we need to reshape ourselves to be more agile, more effective, and even higher-performing.
Today, we are making the tough but prudent decision to streamline our operations to position Consensys for ongoing rapid innovation, long-term sustainability under possibly volatile scenarios, and continued leadership in the web3 space.
This decision impacts 20% of Consensys’ total workforce. We are deeply grateful for their contributions in getting Consensys to where it is today, and we are committed to providing all affected employees with substantial support as they move on to their next chapter.
Since its inception, Consensys has been dedicated to supporting the vision and mission of the Ethereum project and, beyond that, driving progressively towards rigorous decentralization. In the coming weeks, we’ll be making concrete announcements that demonstrate our commitment.”
DECEMBER 27, 2018 — Original post…
New York City, New York-based ConsenSys, a blockchain-associated technology incubator and technology company, has announced a major restructuring that will result in a significant reduction in headcount and the spin-off of companies that received ConsenSys financial support.
The number of employees impacted is estimated to be in the hundreds with the possibility of up to a sixty percent of its 1,200 employees being affected. The company has suggested that the restructuring is the result of major competition in the blockchain space and the company’s desire to exit the incubator business, known as ConsenSys Labs, in favor of being a more traditional venture capital investor. The leadership and employees of the approximately fifty projects being funded by ConsenSys would need additional financial support, and lacking this support would mean having to radically downsize or close down their projects.
The company was intimately involved with the Ethereum crypto-currency and looked to gains in the Ethereum units to continue funding the enterprise. ConsenSys was primarily funded by its founder who was said to have a crypto-based fortune in the low billions. When the price of ETH tokens falling from $1,417.38 to $102.44, ConsenSys could not longer afford to fund its projects with an estimated burn rate of $100 million per year. Hence the spin off of the projects.
While most people think of blockchain as the technology behind crypto-currencies, which appear to be collapsing or fluctuating in wild swings, the technology can be applied to most systems that require a record of secure transactions that are available to all without a central server and control mechanism. However, most companies prefer to serve as the keepers of a a well-controlled proprietary platform rather than a free-form enterprise piggybacking on a public system.
Change is coming. There will always be a tomorrow, no matter how much you may try to ignore it. There are no guarantees in life or promises for a bright future. We see good people being laid off through no fault of their own. Just because something terrible hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't. It can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere. No one is guaranteed to wake up tomorrow and still have a job by evening. While many employees can read the writing on the wall, why do most assume it’s targeted at someone else? Are you now wondering, Am I Next?