Blockchain software engineering firm ConsenSys is laying off 96 staffers - 11% of its workforce - citing the crypto bear market and wider economic environment.
ConsenSys has been at the centre of the Web3 revolution, setting itself the task of unlocking the "collaborative power of communities by making DAOs, NFTs, and DeFi universally easy to use, access, and build on".
Last year, it hit a $7 billion valuation on a $450 million funding round joined by the likes of Microsoft and Temasek. The funding had been earmarked for 600 hires.
However, in a letter posted on the company's site, CEO Joseph Lubin says that the web3 industry has been hit by the sector's bear market and the macroeconomic environment.
He also took aim at the crypto centralised finance (CeFi) sector, writing that "some of the poorly behaved CeFi actors in our space have brought a reckoning on themselves which has cast a broad pall on our ecosystem that we will all need to work through".
As it trims its workforce, ConsenSys is focusing its business on two areas: a MetaMask end-user and developer platform that provides the digital authority foundation for people to build on, access, and use web3; and the Infura’s developer platform to help scale and enable developers to build out the blockchain application economy.