Crypto Winter Will Last 'At Least Another Year' Says Founder of Crypto Firm Which Just Laid Off 40% of Its Workforce

cryptonews.com:

Octopus Network, a multichain cryptonetwork built on NEAR Protocol, has laid off some 40% of the core team and lowered pay for the rest due to the ongoing crypto winter - a cold wave that will not be ending for at least another year, argued the project's founder Louis Liu. 

The string of companies announcing layoffs in the cryptoworld, citing the prolonged sour market conditions, is only getting longer.

Among the latest is Octopus Network which announced a set of restructuring measures and what it named the ‘Voluntary Separation Program’. As part of this program, 12 of 30 members of the core team would leave the project and would be given "proper compensation." 

And that's not all the cuts they're making. The announcement penned by the project founder stated that,

"The remaining team members will accept a 20% salary cut, and the team token incentive will be suspended indefinitely."

This measure was necessary as the Web3 companies are expected to be hit with a strong crypto winter blow, the announcement suggested. It stated that Octopus Network was designed to support Web3 applications by providing appchain infrastructure on-demand - the operational cost of which is higher than a smart contract on a shared Layer 1 blockchain.

Therefore, Liu wrote that,

"Because it takes a big chunk of resources to support an appchain in terms of IT infrastructure and community mindshare, the Octopus community can’t afford to onboard a batch of appchains only to lose most of them in one year. This is why I decided to revise the Octopus strategy."

The NEAR blockchain and the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) are "the two cornerstones" of the new strategy, he said, the goal being for the Octopus Network to survive crypto winter. IBC is a