On Wednesday, Luno, a London-based cryptocurrency exchange, informed its employees of major layoffs. According to their LinkedIn profile, the crypto business has around 960 employees, meaning that roughly 330 jobs will be affected by the 35% cutback in the global workforce. CNBC reports that the firm’s CEO, Marcus Swanepoel, revealed the news to staff during a live-streamed town hall.
In an internal memo to CNBC, Swanepoel stated:
“2022 has been an incredibly tough year for the broader tech industry and, in particular, the crypto market. As such, Luno has not been spared from this turbulence which has led to a decrease in overall growth and revenue numbers.”
Talk from different individuals
A spokesperson for Luno said that these layoffs will mainly target their marketing teams while having “minimal or no impact on key operating and compliance teams”. The redundancies come as no surprise considering that the pandemic has had a major impact on businesses worldwide, making it.
The London-based exchange, part of the DCG conglomerate, has a presence in multiple countries across the world, from Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa to Singapore, Lagos, and Sydney. DCG has been hard hit by the recent collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire FTX, including its lending arm Genesis filing for bankruptcy last week.
This is part of a larger string of events that have rocked the crypto industry since May of last year with the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin crash. In a memo this week sent to employees, CEO Swanepoel said these “series of shocks” he then added that:
“While we anticipated a downturn and proactively planned ahead with a business and funding model that can be resilient to some of these factors, the sheer scale and speed of all of this happening, and all at the same time has put significant strain on our original plan.
What this means in practice is that in addition to streamlining our strategy to focus on our core strengths, we need to also substantially decrease our cost base – which includes employee headcount in all of our markets – in order for us to be set up for success going forward.”
