By George Ward
The USD Coin (USDC) issuer, Circle, has revealed plans to increase staff strength by 10-15% amid job cuts across the digital asset industry. Circle’s latest move came months after the firm announced the termination of the SPAC deal to go public.
Hiring Amid A Sea Of Layoffs
As a result of the financial woes that have impacted the broader crypto industry, a large percentage of firms have resorted to job cuts in their bid to stay in business. At the same time, Circle has done the opposite by announcing new positions to increase its workforce.
Since the start of the year, the crypto industry has contributed to the global workforce layoffs by 43%. This comes as some of the most prominent players in the sector significantly reduced their workforce.
Such firms include Chainalysis, Polygon, Huobi, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Bittrex, Wyre, Genesis, and Gemini. Meanwhile, a critical factor behind the continued job cuts in the digital asset space is the prolonged crypto winter and the several bankruptcy cases that have wiped billions of dollars from the balance sheets of exposed firms.
However, the continued layoffs in the crypto industry are not an isolated case, as other traditional tech firms also announced significant job cuts. Close to 48,000 employees were laid off from just four companies last month; Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce.
Circle is expanding its workforce weeks after terminating its merger deal with SPAC to go public. Last December, the USDC stablecoin issuer mutually ended its plans to go public via the particular purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
The SPAC deal was initially announced in July 2021 and has a pilot valuation of $4.5 billion which was later amended in February 2022 after Circle saw its market cap shoot to $9 billion. Then, Circle’s chief financial officer, Jeremy Fox-Geen, revealed that the company intends to go public but awaits more favorable market conditions.
He stated that the crypto market needs more time to heal from the Terra and FTX implosions before public-market investors can assess the future of the virtual currency business.
The Crypto Labor Market Trends
The general belief about the similarities or otherwise between the crypto and tech labor market is that both are different and do not sync similarly. In January’s interview with the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said the U.S. labor market is robust.
Data from the U.S. Department of Labor also echoed Powell’s sentiment, revealing a 517,000 job increase in January, with the unemployment rate at a steady 3.4%. Elsewhere, data from CoinGecko indicates that layoffs in the crypto industry have affected 2,806 individuals, a significant number given that 6,820 workers lost their jobs in the same sector last year.
In January 2023 alone, the crypto job layoffs have attained 41% of the net job losses for 2022.