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Companies in the crypto space have laid off more than 1,500 people in the past two months.

The number is based on publicly announced layoffs dating back to earlier this spring when the digital asset market entered what has become an extended drawdown.

Many of the layoffs have been concentrated around crypto exchanges — Tuesday’s announcement by Coinbase that it would lay off approximately 1,100 people was by far the largest event yet. That exchanges would lead the way is perhaps unsurprising, likely reflecting concerns of a reduction in trading volume at such venues.

These companies include Bitso, Gemini, BitMEX and Buenbit. Crypto financial services like BlockFi and Crypto.com have also shed employees, citing market conditions.

However, it should be noted that the crypto industry is far from alone when it comes to job cuts.

As CNBC reported Tuesday, real estate companies Redfin and Compass axed 8% and 10% of employees, respectively, on fears that the US housing market is heading for a prolonged chill after a frenzied period.

In late April, Robinhood said it was trimming “approximately 9%” of its global staff. Klarna, a firm that offers buy now pay later (BNPL) financing, laid off roughly 700 people.

Layoff data tracking site Layoffs.fyi reflects numerous workforce reductions across the tech and financial services sectors(https://layoffs.fyi/). As CBS News noted Tuesday, some 35,000 tech workers have been laid off since the start of 2022.

Below are some of the most notable names in the crypto industry that have announced layoffs:

Coinbase

On June 14, the publicly traded crypto exchange Coinbase said it was cutting its workforce by “about 18%.”

Approximately 1,100 people were affected by this move, as The Block reported Tuesday morning.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong positioned the move as one aimed at helping the firm through the current “economic downturn.”

“Our employee costs are too high to effectively manage this uncertain market,” he wrote.

Affected employees had access to Coinbase systems before being notified of the layoffs, according to the company. This event was confirmed in LinkedIn posts shared by Coinbase staffers who posted to the professional networking platform about their lost jobs.

Gemini

Crypto exchange operator Gemini, another US-based firm, slashed about 10% of its workforce, totaling roughly 100 job cuts at the company.

“This is where we are now, in the contraction phase that is settling into a period of stasis — what our industry refers to as ‘crypto winter,’” Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss said in a statement at the time. “This has all been further compounded by the current macroeconomic and geopolitical turmoil. We are not alone.”

Crypto.com

On Friday, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said on Twitter that the firm was laying off 5% of its employee base. About 260 employees were estimated to have lost their jobs.

“We will continue to evaluate how to best optimize our resources to position ourselves as the strongest builders during the down cycle to become the biggest winners during the next bull run,” Marszalek said in his statement.

BlockFi

Crypto lending and financial services platform BlockFi said Monday that it has shed “roughly 20%” of its employees.

Based on the firm’s earlier statement that it had grown to more than 850 people, this would mean more than 150 people lost their jobs at the firm.

Co-founders Zac Prince and Flori Marquez said in a blog post that the decision was made in light of “market conditions that have had a negative impact on our growth rate and a rigorous review of our strategic priorities.”

BitMEX

Crypto derivatives trading platform BitMEX announced 75 employee layoffs in early April.

That move came after the collapse of a bank acquisition deal, as The Block previously reported.

“BitMEX is making changes to our workforce in order to streamline for the next phase of our business,” the firm said at the time.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler continued to push that much of the activity in the crypto space could potentially fall under the purview of the securities regulator, calling out lenders and exchanges that could be supporting unregistered securities.

A recent bill introduced by US Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand would codify the jurisdiction of certain regulators over different parts of the crypto space, creating a framework to categorize certain tokens and designate their overseer. It also seeks to clarify and codify questions related to taxation and registration.

At the Wall Street Journal’s CFO Network Summit, Gensler was asked to address the bill, and though he said he wouldn’t comment directly on the legislation before talking to the lawmakers themselves, he worried about the general possibility of undermining protections in the market and wants to preserve “the employees’ basic bargain for raising money from the public.”

This basic bargain, according to Gensler, is based on full and fair disclosures free of fraud and misleading statements.

“We don’t want our current stock exchanges, our current mutual funds, our current public companies to sort of inadvertently, by the stroke of a pen, say ‘I want to be noncompliant as well, I want to be outside this regime’ that I think has been quite a benefit to investors and economic growth over the last 90 years,” he said.

Much of the crypto space, he said, has key attributes of securities and are thus beholden to this basic bargain. This includes many lenders, according to Gensler. He pointed to the recent BlockFi settlement in his comments, saying the SEC found in that situation that the high-yield offerings constituted an unregistered security. 

Today’s crypto lending platforms are offering rates up to 17%, and while this is attractive to the public, it’s unclear what stands behind the ability to realize those returns, according to Gensler.

“You can see the investing public could be attracted to that, but what stands behind those plans? And that’s what we’re really looking at here.”

BlockFi’s settlement has turned into a path towards registration, and Gensler said the SEC will try their best to find similar paths with other lending platforms and exchanges that could potentially list unregistered securities on their platforms.

“But to the extend that they are unregistered securities offerings, non-compliant securities offerings for investment companies, we will try to take to them, try to get them registered, but also bring, where necessary, enforcement actions,” he said.

He also referenced the reason halt of withdrawals on Celsius, a crypto lending platform, though he did not mention the lender by name. He compared Celsius’s halting of withdrawals to actions taken during the meme stock run, contrasting that crypto lacks investor protections that were in place in traditional markets during the meme stock controversies.

“You couldn’t trade, but they were clearly your assets,” he said. “Here in crypto exchanges and lending, we should be able to bring those same protections and make sure that those protections are there, but they’re not there right now.”

Still, he reiterated that there is a potential path forward for lenders in dialogue with the regulator. As of now, he said about six crypto projects are working to register crypto markets, focusing on what disclosures are necessary for the tokens on their platform. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

After a rough start to the week, with a crypto-wide sell-off on Monday, many Bitcoin mining companies recovered modestly on the stock markets Tuesday.

Core Scientific, Riot and Bit Digital went up by as much as +5.94%, +5.16% and +4.88%, respectively.

Having announced today the acquisition of a 50-megawatt facility earlier today, Digihost still saw its stock drop by -6.11%.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Tuesday, June 14:

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Online retailer Overstock has converted its Digital Voting Series A-1 Preferred Stock, a security token, and its Voting Series B Preferred Stock into shares of the company’s common stock. 

The firm announced that the Series A-1 and Series B shares stopped trading at market close on June 10. Investors who held the preferred shares will see common shares in their brokerage accounts when their broker-dealers update their records with the Depository Trust & Clearing Organization to distribute the new shares. 

The move reflects the outcome of a May 12 shareholder vote approving the conversion. 

“This conversion simplifies our equity capital structure by moving to a single class of stock from three classes, and is what our investors wanted,” said Overstock CEO Jonathan Johnson in a statement.

The Series A-1 shares were traded on the PRO Securities alternative trading service, a registered platform operated by a subsidiary of Overstock’s blockchain arm, tZERO. In 2019, the venture drew scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which served Overstock two or more subpoenas on tZERO and the security token offering. That ultimately led to a fine for tZERO in January of this year, when the SEC alleged the platform made a number of errors in its filing of disclosures. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The House of Representatives is preparing to hear testimony on digital asset regulation later this month, The Block has learned. 

Three sources with knowledge of the matter say that the House Agriculture Committee’s subcommittee on commodity exchanges, energy, and credit is preparing a hearing entitled “Future of Digital Assets Regulation” for June 23.

The subcommittee had not yet established a witness list. 

The hearing takes place as the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, which oversee the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are both considering legislation to place more authority over cryptocurrency markets with the CFTC rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and John Boozman (R-AR), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Ag Committee, are working on joint legislation addressing this gap, as first reported by Politico and which a representative for Senator Boozman confirmed to The Block. 

Leading the House Ag Committee is Representative David Scott (D-GA), who last month took FTX to task for a proposal to disintermediate options trading. 

Representatives for Congressman Scott and his Republican counterpart on the full committee, Glenn Thompson (R-PA), had not returned requests for confirmation as of press time. 

Recent market events like the collapse of Terra and crypto lending platform Celsius’ freeze on user withdrawals have cast a pall on crypto’s reputation in Congress. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Quick Take

• Based in Menlo Park, California, Kleiner Perkins is a venture capital firm specializing in investing in incubation, early-stage, and growth companies
• As far back as 2015, the Silicon Valley investment firm was interested in Bitcoin and the potential of digital assets when it made its first bet on the sector with its investment in Veem (Formerly Align Commerce)
• In total, Kleiner Perkins has made 13 investments across seven verticals, which The Block has mapped out

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CEL, the native token of crypto lending platform Celsius, was trading up 100% on Tuesday at one point.

At the time of writing CEL was trading at $0.56, up from $0.27 a day previous representing an increase of 114%. 

The lending firm, which had some $12 billion in customer assets as of May according to the Financial Times, announced on Sunday that it would pause withdrawals on its platform — citing market conditions as the price of Ether (ETH) and other cryptocurrencies plummeted.

By 8 am Eastern Time on Monday morning CEL tokens were worth just $0.18, a week previous on June 6 they had traded as high as $0.78. 

But in a market move that seemed to end as soon as it began, the price of CEL shot up by over 100% during trading Tuesday, rising has high as $2.57, according to FTX data. The price has since declined from that spike.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

A number of crypto investment vehicles in Europe pared losses on Tuesday following a volatile day of trading on Monday. 

However, most ETNs and ETPs that The Block tracks daily continued to fall on the back of an uncertain macroeconomic environment, following a large sell-off in the crypto markets over the weekend and into Monday. 

Meanwhile, 21Shares Cardano and Polkadot ETPs gained ground on Tuesday, up 0.92% and 1.03% respectively. 

Here’s how some of the major European crypto investment vehicles performed on Tuesday, June 14:

21Shares Polygon ETP suffered the largest losses, as seen below, down 4.44% for the day while most all other crypto investment vehicles traded within a similar range for the day. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Tron DAO bought another $500 million worth of the stablecoin USDC on Tuesday to further expand its reserve assets pool and salvage confidence in its algorithmic stablecoin called Decentralized USD (USDD).

Tron DAO confirmed the latest acquisition in a Twitter post.

Over the last month, Tron has continued to grow its assets rapidly so it controls more collateral than the total value of its stablecoin supply. This approach, it believes, would prevent USDD from crumbling under intense pressure.

Still, the USDD stablecoin has slightly de-pegged against the dollar amid a major slump in broader crypto markets. USDD dipped as low as $0.974 Tuesday morning before recovering to $0.98 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko data.

At the moment, USDD’s market capitalization is slightly over $700 million, whereas it holds more than 1.5 billion in collateral reserves. According to Tron DAO’s website, it currently holds 1 billion USDC, 140 million USDT, and 1.9 billion tron ($110 million) and 14,000 bitcoin ($310 million). 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t want the proof-work crypto mining moratorium recently passed by the state legislature to be signed into law.

Adams said that he intends to ask New York Governor Kathy Hochul to veto the bill, according to Crain’s New York Business.

The bill would put on hold any new permits for behind-the-meter crypto mining operations using fossil fuel energy and direct the Department of Environmental Conservation to conduct a General Environmental Impact Statement.

Adams has previously taken a pro-crypto stand, stating last year that he wants to make New York City “crypto-friendly.”

Lawmakers opposing the bill have called it “anti-crypto,” arguing that it would drive miners and jobs out of the state and hinder New York’s ability to be a leader in the crypto sector as a whole.

The bill’s sponsor, Assemblywoman Anna Kelles, has opposed that view and said repeatedly that due to the bill’s narrow scope, it would only apply to a small number of previously fossil-fuel power plants.

“It’s disappointing that @NYCMayor wants to take upstate NY back to the cryptocurrency stone age when there is so much exciting innovation happening in the Web3 arena,” Kelles tweeted in reaction to the news.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.