Crypto Payment Channel Banxa Reduces Its Staff By 30% To Survive Crypto Winter

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The cryptocurrency market has been facing a second bloodbath without any gap for the first time in history, disrupting the blockchain industry to a vast extent. Consequently, crypto-oriented businesses, including exchanges and payment channels, reduce their workforce due to decreased crypto trading volume affecting the revenue.

Similarly, the Australian crypto payment channel, Banxa, used to convert fiat to crypto and vice versa has shrunk its staff by 30%, considering the current market distortion, per the report of Financial Review.

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The Chief Executive Officer at Banxa, Holger Arians, added;

We were working to manage large trading volumes and investing in new products and new markets to support our partners. With the sudden economic downturn, we’ve had to very quickly manage costs and reduce our focus to core, revenue-generating initiatives.

Banxa is a web 3.0 payment gateway, and it started publicly trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange in January 2021. By initially facilitating the customers at its best, it increased its valuation by nearly 74% in the last 12 months. 

A broad customer growth increased the number of company’s employees to 230 last year, located over the globe, including Europe and Indonesia. But now, as the firm’s executives have decided to cut the redundant job posts, the number of working employees has reached 160. Similarly, Banxa’s market capitalization has declined nearly half of it in the past few days.

Bitcoin is currently trading below the $21,000 level on the hourly chart | BTC/USD price chart from Tradingview.com

CEO Believes Crypto Bears Will Stay For One Year

As analysts around already have been predicting downtrends ahead, the Australian payment medium Banxa has been taking action to decrease its cost since May by canceling inner events like dinners, drinks, etc., because the CEO of Banxa expects bearish trends to last the whole next year.

Mr. Arians added; 

We are now entering what looks like a bear market, while it appears that the US could be entering a recession. Like many others in our industry [we] are anticipating another crypto winter, with trading volumes declining significantly. We saw Banxa’s market capitalization nearly halve in a matter of days, and the forecast is that these conditions will most likely continue for another 12 months.

He further explained that reducing employees would not hurt the platform’s performance. Still, it would allow the company to be more focused and leaner as the payment channel would be able to prioritize higher margins and profits in this bearish time.

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Likewise, the well-known crypto exchange Coinbase has reduced its workforce by 18% because of the crypto carnage. However, it would allow the platform to remain healthy as crypto bears seem to stay ahead for a long time, per the official blog post published on June 14.

Other crypto platforms following the same measures to survive in the downtrends include BlockFi, cutting 20% of its staff. And Crypo.com, which announced to reduce its workforce by 5% or say 260 employees lost jobs.

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