Almost 100 employees have been laid off at multiple business units within Polygon.
In an announcement on Tuesday, Polygon Labs said it has reduced its team by 20% as part of an effort to consolidate its business units.
“This was a painfully hard decision, but a necessary step in our journey,” said Polygon Labs.
The impacted employees had their access to Polygon systems, including Slack and email, abruptly cut off as a “necessary security measure,” a former Polygon employee told CoinDesk.
The Polygon team maintained that their treasury was still healthy, with a balance of over $250 million and 1.9 billion of its native MATIC tokens. After the news, MATIC was trading at around $1.42, down 5% in the last day.
Polygon is still looking ahead to launch its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) mainnet beta on March. 27. The widely anticipated scaling solution would help process transactions faster on a Layer 2 blockchain by packaging various off-chain transactions into a single one on-chain.
Company-wide layoffs have been a recurring theme in the crypto industry over the last few weeks. DCG subsidiary and major crypto lender Genesis let go of 30% of its workforce after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this year. Ethereum infrastructure company ConsenSys also laid off 96 employees to “adjust to challenging and uncertain market conditions.”
As of Wednesday, CoinDesk estimated that 29,743 crypto jobs had been lost since April 2022.
