US-based Circle, the issuer of the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin, plans to cut its workforce by 15 to 25 percent by 2023 expand. This is a striking development, because the rest of the industry has had to lay off people because of the bear market. This decision also comes at a time when the stablecoin industry is under great pressure.
Against the flow
With this decision, Circle is going against the grain and the American company is showing its muscles to the rest of the industry. About 41 percent of all layoffs in 2023 took place in the crypto industry. Companies like Polygon, Chainalysis, Bybit, Huobi, Crypto.com, Coinbase, Gemini, Genesis and Wyre had to let people go.
The long and dark crypto winter caused industry companies to lose billions of dollars. Not only the crypto world is currently in trouble. In January alone, 48,000 people were laid off at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce.
Slowly but surely, the tech world is starting to feel the pain of the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes. More and more companies are getting into trouble, but they apparently don’t notice this at Circle, because they want to expand the workforce in 2023.
Cancellation of the IPO
In July 2021, Circle announced it would go public through a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC). A SPAC is a listed entity containing a collection of companies. Originally, Circle was to be included in a SPAC at a value of $4.5 billion. That IPO however fell into the water in February 2022, after Circle’s market value skyrocketed to $9 billion.
Jeremy Fox-Green, Circle’s chief financial officer (CFO), says the company still wants to go public, but they are waiting for better market conditions. According to Fox-Green, the industry still needs to move away from the TerraUSD crash and FTX implosion to allow the market and investors to rethink the future of digital assets. Confidence has to return and that takes time.