WazirX Lays Off 40 Percent Workforce to Deal With Crypto Winter

Indian exchange WazirX laid off 40 percent of its total workforce, the company said in a statement. The company said the laid-off was done to weather the bearish week for the crypto market. It said its priority was to be financially stable and to continue serving our customers.

A week ago, the enforcement directorate (ED) had frozen the bank accounts of the crypto exchange firm.

The company in a statement to CoinDesk said, “As India’s No. 1 exchange, our priority is to be financially stable and to continue serving our customers.”

“To achieve this, we’ve had to reduce our staff to weather the crypto winter. This situation is similar to the trying times the industry faced in 2018; at that time, we doubled down and built our innovative P2P engine,” the company said and added that the crypto industry operates in cycles and the bear market is inevitably followed by a spectacular bull market.

The company said the firm would continue to focus on our customer needs and continue to build and the company is confident that it will come out stronger when the bull market arrives.

It is said that as many as 70 employees or 40 percent of the exchange’s workforce of 150 were laid off. The laid-off workers were told that they would be paid for 45 days and would not be required to report for work.

The firm said on Saturday, “The crypto market has been in the grip of a bear market because of the current global economic slowdown.”

“The Indian crypto industry has had its unique problems with respect to taxes, regulations and banking access. This has led to a dramatic fall in volumes in all Indian crypto exchanges.”

Recently, the Indian exchange has faced a slew of problems including an online spat between WazirX Co-founder Nischal Shetty and Binance Chief Executive Officer Changpeng Zhao about whether Binance is the parent company of the Indian exchange.

WazirX is an India-based bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange headquartered in Mumbai, that offers an auto-matching P2P (peer-to-peer) engine. It was launched in March 2018. It is run by Nischal Schetty, Sameer Mhatre, and Siddharth Menon.

Data from April 1 to September 14 showed a drop in daily trading volumes on WazirX and CoinDCX. These two firms are two of India’s largest crypto exchanges.