Since our founding, we have weathered the dynamic cyclicality of the web3 industry as it evolves from exuberant surges toward inevitable maturity. While I’ve often said that the fear and greed cycles are shortening in duration, our current bear market also coincides with a very challenging macroeconomic environment driven by surging inflation, lagging economic activity, and increased geopolitical unrest. And against that backdrop, some of the poorly behaved CeFi actors in our space have brought a reckoning on themselves which has cast a broad pall on our ecosystem that we will all need to work through. Ultimately this will be a net positive for the ecosystem.
After raising multiple rounds of funding, we've gained significant traction in our core products, helped accelerate our ecosystem, and became better organized internally for long-term success. We remain committed to our vision, but as our teams are well aware, the path to the decentralized future is not without its challenges. To manage through these cycles, we regularly engage in conservative financial planning and take appropriate steps to ensure we have the resources to fulfill our vision, even through uncertain market conditions – and the uncertainty hasn’t been greater over the last few decades.
Today we need to make the extremely difficult decision to streamline some of Consensys’ teams to adjust to challenging and uncertain market conditions. This decision will impact 96 employees, which represents 11% of Consensys’ total workforce. We are extremely grateful for their contributions and the work they’ve accomplished. Each of the impacted employees will be notified today by their manager.
Support for impacted employees
We are ensuring all of our departing employees globally receive extensive support and generous packages as they transition to their next journey. This will include:
Generous severance packages based on tenure.
An extended option exercise window from 12 months to 36 months.
Personalized support from an external placement agency.
Extension of healthcare benefits in relevant jurisdictions.
Focusing our business
Over the last few years we’ve experimented in a lot of verticals. While we are streamlining our workforce, this decision is about focusing our business on the core value drivers:
A MetaMask end-user and developer platform that provides the digital authority foundation for people to build on, access, and use web3.
Infura’s developer platform to help scale and enable developers to build out the blockchain application economy.
We will also pursue innovative new offerings to empower developers and creators to thrive in web3, grow web3 commerce and DAO communities, and amplify the decentralized identity and verifiable credentials ecosystems.
In streamlining the company we held in mind two goals: reducing operating expenses while increasing the strength and focus of our product teams. The product teams will continue to grow and we will continue to empower them with the right resources. Our efforts in 2023 will continue to focus on scaling our core offerings and building new crypto-native revenue models. We will continue to invest strategically in growth areas and new opportunities.
Where we are going
I believe we will soon shift from the age of silos and exploitation into the age of community and collaboration. During the last ecosystem surge, over 30 million people each month were using MetaMask to access DeFi protocols, mint and trade NFTs, and participate in DAOs. Approximately 100 million people use MetaMask for various functions on a regular basis. Going forward, NFTs and other Web3 constructs will enable people, groups, or DAOs to liberate their social graph from the networks, or establish their own novel community constructs.
In an attempt to capitalize on all this interest in an entirely new internet economy, centralized financial products began offering similar ways to earn yield on crypto assets. However, as we've seen over the last few months, certain risks exposed and exploited by the “money crypto” companies in the ecosystem look a lot more like traditional finance: third-party custody, third-party-facilitated payments, illicit finance, and market manipulation. Web3 isn’t entirely without software risk, yet at its core is a different assumption of trust. We’re building a future where you don’t — shouldn’t — have to trust an institution to ensure you have access to your assets, or can participate in activities that create value broadly for communities.
This challenging moment we are facing as an industry presents an opportunity to move from outsourcing trust to organizations that have failed repeatedly, to a future where decentralized systems automate trust and enable individuals and communities to exercise control over their own digital assets and their financial futures.
What lies ahead is massive potential for web3, a multi-year journey that we are excited and honored to be on.
- Joseph Lubin
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