Crypto Winter Gets Icier Just Days Into New Year

investopedia.com:

Less than a week into the New Year, the cryptocurrency winter is turning icier as job cuts mount, regulators turn up the heat and firms warn of losses--and there's little sign the tumult will ebb anytime soon.

Crypto lender Genesis axed 30% of its staff, the second round of job cuts in recent weeks, and is considering bankruptcy after losing $175 million locked up in a trading account at the failed trading platform FTX. Genesis also owes $900 million to crypto exchange Gemini, which has criticized how Genesis is handling the financial crisis. 

Silvergate Capital Corp., a crypto-focused California bank, fired 40% of its employees after investors scrambled to redeem $8.1 billion at the bank in the wake of FTX's collapse. Silvergate held deposits for FTX units and Alameda Research, the trading firm behind FTX. Meantime, Chinese crypto exchange Huobi said it plans to ax about 20% of its staff. «With the current state of the bear market, a very lean team will be maintained going forward,» Huobi said in a statement.

Due to the FTX collapse in late 2022, Coinbase cut 18% of its staff, Kraken lost almost one-third of its employees, and Crypto.com lay off 5% of its staff.

In New York, Coinbase Global Inc., a crypto exchange, agreed to pay $100 million to settle claims by New York state that it failed to comply with anti-money-laundering rules. And a U.S. court ruled that the now-bankrupt crypto firm Celsius can keep all its customer's crypto deposits, meaning that clients can't recover their funds from the defunct exchange. The ruling reinforces a ground rule for crypto investors: «not your keys, not your crypto,» which essentially means investors can't be sure that their holdings are protected unless they keep them in a crypto