Leading Hardware Wallet Maker Ledger to Lay Off 12% of Work Force – When Will the Crypto Winter End?
Crypto hardware wallet maker Ledger is laying off 12% of its workforce, reported Bloomberg on Thursday.
Ledger is the crypto industry’s leading maker of so-called hardware wallets – physical devices the provide the secure storage of an individual’s private keys, the password needed for them to gain access to the digital assets sitting in their crypto wallet address.
According to the company’s LinkedIn page, Ledger currently has 734 employees, meaning potential layoffs of around 90.
In an email sent to staff on Thursday, Ledger’s CEO and Chairman Pascal Gauthier said that “macroeconomic headwinds are limiting our ability to generate revenue and “we must continue to make decisions for the longevity of the business”.
Ledger’s plans to reduce the size of its workforce come as the broader crypto industry remains stuck in a significant downturn that has seen countless other crypto firms also reducing the size of their respective workforces over the last year and a half.
2020 and 2021 were years of spectacular growth for the crypto industry, with blue chip coins like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) hitting new all-time highs, many altcoins exploding to monstrous market capitalizations and non-fungible token (NFT) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) markets experiencing tremendous growth.
However an unexpectedly powerful surge in global inflationary pressures forced major central banks like the Fed to slam the breaks on the economy with aggressive rate hikes and liquidity tightening in 2022, with financial conditions remaining at historically tight levels even as 2023 draws to a close.
This tightening, plus other catastrophes such as the collapse of the Terra ecosystem and FTX bankruptcy, took the wind out of the 2020/2021 crypto bull
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