Slimming down

Training-Wheels-iantoons

“Slimming down” – a cartoon that illustrates the shift towards smaller teams at many of the leading blockchain companies.

The news of CZ’s departure from Binance is a headline that attracted interest, but the number of layoffs across the industry has gathered pace in the last six months despite a general sentiment that a bull market is returning.

In normal circumstances, we would expect blockchain protocols (e.g. Polygon, Solana, NEAR) to start hiring aggressively to position themselves for growth.

What’s different this time is that industry leaders have realized that a large in-house team of support specialists have gotten in the way of building the decentralized future.

For the industry to become truly decentralized, developers and early stage companies need to start to take on more responsibility, avoiding dependency on teams of marketers and business development specialists subsidized by the parent blockchain protocol.

This trend can be seen by recent layoffs at Polkadot (30% cut of core staff at Parity) and Yuga Labs, where the CEO remarked, “we weren’t optimized to build and manage everything in-house.”

While many companies continue to blame the crypto winter and regulatory uncertainty as requiring an operational reset, it is likely that when the bull market does return, many of the support functions are not coming back at many of the protocol companies.

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“Interesting, as I covered this or “got close” to this on the THETUBEBOYS livestream recently: talking about chains not being utilized… so no revenue, so cutbacks. However, letting the people go that will bring users is not a great move, but tech founders have always done this and hired the wrong commercial / business side people in the first place. You don’t hire SaaS Web2 “A players” who successfully sold finished defined products and expect them to sell the building blocks of novel tech stack software with no defined product. Yes… That’s what a blockchain is, and that’s the bizdev/partnership/growth/marketing people they were and have hired and now fired. “
William De Ath
Hedera Technology Investing x Innovation | Growth x Partnerships
“Interesting perspective, Ian! It seems agility and leaner teams might become the new norm, fostering a more organic growth in the blockchain space.”
Alex Belov
AI Business Automation & Workflows | Superior WordPress Maintenance & Services | Podcast
“Woaha that means W3b Partners Limited will be well positioned with the reshaped offering.
now only seeking some projects that truely need to reshuffle
i always did think that many of these chains are overfatuated with cash, but burn through it building none needed fantasy use cases – i am happy for one that we are building the next toolsets to help large chains recalibrate their economical aspects paired with risk and regulatory insights to support that :)”
Simon G.
finding solutions to real problems
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