Lisk lays off 40% of employees

Blockchain application platform Lisk has laid off approximately 40% of its employees this week, while the contracts of three additional people set to join the company were also terminated.

Max Kordek, co-founder of Lisk, provided a statement regarding the drastic cuts on the project’s Discord channel:

“Today at Lightcurve, we laid off 21 of our employees and terminated the contracts of three employees who were yet to join.

“This concludes the recent wave of terminations you may have observed. We are now ready to go completely dedicated into 2020 with a solid team of 31 individuals on the Lightcurve side.

“The reasons were to decrease our burn rate which by a large degree consisted of human resource costs, and to decrease our operational overhead in order to become more agile again.

“We are looking forward to the next year. Some exciting things are coming.”

What is Lisk?

The open-source project was established back in May 2016 with a focus on blockchain accessibility.

It offers a software development kit (SDK) which provides blockchain application developers with useful tools and cryptocurrency wallets to integrate within their apps.

The LSK utility token is used to pay for transaction fees on the Lisk native blockchain and fuel the ecosystem.

According to Kordek, the company has retained its backend development talent and developer relations departments while cutting down the frontend development departments such as marketing, design, and operations.

Lisk is the latest in a long line of crypto companies to make staff cuts as they look to survive in the space. Back in January, crypto exchange ShapeShift laid off 37 staff members, citing the bear market as a primary reason.