As the business situation worsens due to a sharp drop in crypto prices, U.S. coin exchanges are engaged in tight management by freezing or reducing the size of employment. In the crypto industry, pessimism is rising that “the boom has ended and winter has come.”
According to Bloomberg News on the 2nd (local time), Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the United States, plans to freeze employment for the time being and scrap plans to hire a number of workers.
Coinbase originally planned to triple its workforce this year, but announced its plan to slow down new hiring last month when crypto prices plunged.
Coinbase has 4,948 full-time employees, of which 1,700 have been hired in the past year. As a result, the operating cost of Coinbase reached 1.7 billion dollars in the first quarter, up 9% from the previous quarter.
Coinbase cited the recent market environment and business priority selection as the background of the decision.
Bitcoin’s price, which accounts for about 45% of the total crypto market value, approached a record high of 69,000 dollars in November last year, but it has plummeted since then, recently giving up the 26,000-dollar level and now rising and falling to 30,000-dollar level.
While the U.S. central bank Federal Reserve (Fed) began to collect the huge liquidity it had released to respond to COVID-19, the global crypto market fluctuated last month in the aftermath of the plunge in Luna and TerraUSD (UST).
Coinbase, which generates most of its sales from brokerage fees, saw its sales fall 27% in the first quarter of this year due to a decrease in transaction performance.
Shares of the Coin Exchange, which received attention last year when it was listed on the U.S. stock market, hit a new low last month, and Coinbase also expressed its intention to focus more on profitable sectors.
