8 thousand people is not a lot for a company doing trillions of dollars of transactions in dozens of countries most which have at least some regulation. That would be a lot if they were all engineers and quants, but even there, an electronic stock market is a tricky little devil to build and operate.
So is this a bad outlook for crypto, a serious setback in the various regulatory battles, or just another brick in the wall of what is increasing looking like Don’t Poach Gate 2.0? (Sorry Bond Villains, the kids were going to hear about that eventually.)
One example is all the amazing new research in zero-knowledge proofs, MPC, FHE, and modern cryptography in general, that is motivated and funded by cryptocurrency projects.
This is actually a worry i have about in regards to crypto, the BTC network uses a staggering amount of power.
Ai is next of my power hungry worry list.
That being said whatever practical uses there are for crypto is entirely detached from the value of crypto.
BTC has the best legal argument for being treated as a commodity, but there has been no legislative decision on this.
The CTFC sees BTC and ETH as commodities. Gensler pre-SEC said BTC, ETC, and LTC are commodities. The SEC and Gensler post-SEC says they are all securities, except maybe BTC.
The Ripple decision (Yesterday) says that unless a crypto is contractually sold to an investor (e.g. not directly listed via an exchange) then its doesn't fall under the Howey test.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-says-sec-lawsuit-vs-r...
Applications that have seen major technical advancements since 2020 include identity, gaming, money markets, trade routing, anti fraud, derivatives, concentrated liquidity, token launchpads, smart nfts, social media, and cross chain communication.
My opinion is that of these blockchain gaming will likely be the most successful in the next bull cycle. Axie and cryptokitties from the previous cycle were extremely limited and unfun, with axie also having issues with design centralization that led to the huge North Korean hack. These issues will probably still exist but there are now technical solutions.
It was overall a bit of a win for ripple but far from the end of the game.
Anecdotally, all of the normies I know of who were really "into crypto" during the pandemic are coming around to thinking of the whole thing as a shark pit full of scams. There can't be that much new blood out there left to recruit to the pyramid at this point.
BTC is ironically not a very free market in that sense, moreover, because nobody needs it for anything, it has a buy-hold characteristic.
If people needed BTC for things (which would force some liquidity ops) then we'd see a price that reflected something.
Crypto markets are essentially 'schemes' of one kind or another, they serve no purpose other than to be a hustle.
If people want to play dumb games, that's fine, as long as they are doing it legally and it doesn't rope in a lot of external players.
Even "knowing this" (I mean, none of us have really any proof just at what scale it's happening at and... the same things happens in the S&P500 with high frequency trading algorithms/bots trading back and forth, hedge funds, institutional investors, etc.) I don't feel like I can confidently explain who/how many people really dollar cost average into Bitcoin that can prop it up to $10k, $20k, $30k, etc.
Where/who are the buyers? How many people across the world are actively STILL investing directly into BTC to the point where it's up 80-90% YTD?
That "or digital" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. You are effectively claiming that crypto has to be allowed or digital photos with friends are right behind.
You can have my cryptokitties.
This seems pretty out of touch.
I own some crypto. Mostly BTC, some ETH and even a bit of XRP I've held onto. I can see the utility, maybe. But, what innovation is happening in this space? It's mostly scam after scam.
There are literally thousands of coins on CoinMarketCap. What are they all doing?
Direct commodity and commodity-representational currencies were the first challengers to fiat currencies, and for about the first millenium after the first know fiat was introduced, generally won.
Cryptocurrency is not the “first challenger to fiat currency ever”.
Except they fail at that. Any further innovation will be more of the same: grift.
You’re currently spewing nonsense.
Who is “we”? How would this “law” be compatible with the US constitution? How would this “law” be enforced? This must be the most naive take in this entire thread.
A 12.5% reduction. Also, they are way larger than I thought with 8k employees. I don't know what's involved with running an exchange but they must be into lots of things with that many folks.
The support must be massive too. And the legal aspect must also keep people busy from having to enforce various regulations to having to answer to various governments...
So let's take a comparison: - facebook: 50k employee. What has changed on Facebook for the last few years? So yes, there is probably some support, the content enforcement of course must keep a lot of people busy, but then?..
- snapchat: 5k employee. Well, for a social media platform which is not changing at all and actually losing in revenue, that's a big number
What do you mean? Facebook changes literally every day. Every single day a piece of UI randomly stops working.
I feel like these companies are solving a relatively simple problem, and a single skilled engineer working full time could probably make and maintain a decent scalable solution.
”Authorities Investigating <DeFi Corp> as Evidence that Depleted Uranium Propped Up Dense Talent, Actually Empty Inside”
There's no fig-leaf such as "they killed entire projects" or "they pivoted".
Just the spokesperson saying that, if you're one of the laid-off employees, it's because you lacked talent.
Not sure that's a company I'd want to work for.
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1537013824666095617
Jun 2022, didn't age well.
Makes you look really successful (they pay a lot, so they must be super profitable!) and helps, at least partially, select employees who won’t be asking questions, just do their job and collect paychecks.
A public statement lasting a year in the Wild West that is crypto isn’t the worst.
Though that’s primarily due to the lowness of the bar.
That has actually aged well.
Managers do.
If I am a Director of Engineering with 5 reports and you are a Director of Engineering with 10 reports then you are going for the VP of Eng role on next promotion.
Like it or hate it that's why every company bloats up over time.
Company pays salaries.
And you enlarge your status.
A binance user asked me to pay USD40 using binance: I went through the process of signing up - it was incredibly difficult with significant roadblocks at every step - horrific UI choices.
A company that fails to onboard a paying user is not going to do well.
The only reason I made it through the onboarding was that I was very stubborn and I have sufficient knowledge to eventually work past the worst UI blocks. It was an extremely frustrating and confusing process.
Even once I had passed the KYC compliance and got money deposited (more nightmare), the UI is still a shitfest of unclear usability. So many obvious failures at every step.
Also they had an incentive system to refer someone, but it appears to be completely broken so even their signup incentives are a failure.
I have never had such a poor experience trying to give a company some money.
> Before the layoffs, Binance had a global staff of 8,000.
The whole thing is self-evidently a massive scam! There are still 7,000 people working there!
This is some next level PR "major bull" right here. Not only are they claiming with a straight face that these are not layoffs, but they're saying it's happening because crypto is about to rocket to the moon! (As opposed to, say, Binance being currently raked over the coals by every financial regulator on the planet.)
