Digital asset manager Osprey Funds has laid off 15 employees and currently operates with less than 10 staff, including four members of its management team, a source familiar with the matter told Yahoo Finance.
“Osprey laid off last summer and fall due to the crypto market downturn, but Osprey remains strong,” Osprey Funds CEO Greg King told Yahoo Finance via email.
Osprey’s Bitcoin Trust (obtc)which is available at online brokers Fidelity, Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade, had approximately $46.9 million in assets under management as of Friday, January 1. 6.
Including its BNB, Solana, Polkadot and Algorand trusts, the crypto product issuer has $67.6 million in assets under management in its trusts.
Hit by declining investor appetite for risky assets, digital asset prices plunged in 2022, sending some highly indebted investors crashing. These impacts continue to ripple through the industry in the form of bankruptcies and layoffs.
Three Arrows Capital Crypto Hedge Fund Filing for bankruptcy in early July after facing numerous margin calls. digital travel and Celsius Network followed by Chapter 11 filings soon after, putting thousands of retail investors on the hook for their deposited funds.
In November, crypto exchange FTX has filed for bankruptcy. Court documents show the exchange used client funds to offset losses suffered by interconnected hedge fund Alameda Research.
A fund flow report from digital asset product issuer CoinShares released on Monday showed that flows into crypto products over the past week have “continued a mild negative sentiment that has persisted” into 2023. , with short bitcoin investment products seeing minor inflows of $1.2 million last week.
And the Osprey cuts are just one example of a much larger trend in crypto layoffs.
On April 12, Osprey is listed 22 employees on its website. By August 15, that number had fallen to 19; By November 28, the number had fallen to just 4 frames. Osprey previously tried to launch a hedge fund in August, the source said, but the company told employees its latest cuts were due to the hedge fund’s failed launch.
Crypto firms have cut nearly 9,500 workers through 2022 according to a The Block Research annual report. The figure included major exchanges such as Crypto.com (2,260), Coinbase (1,160), Kraken (1,100), Robinhood (1,060), as well as lenders Celsius (150) and BlockFi (250), which has also filed for bankruptcy since.
Based on data from dismissals. compiled by The Block, the tech industry has seen around 151,600 job cuts through 2022, with crypto job losses contributing 6.2% of the total.
And the job cuts in the industry seem far from over.
Early Friday morning, it was revealed that Asia-based crypto exchange Huobi was planning to cut its staff by 20%. In a statement given to Yahoo Finance, a spokesperson for Huobi, “staff optimization” aims to “optimize structure” and “improve efficiency” so that the veteran crypto exchange can “come back within three first” exchanges in volume of transactions. Huobi has already fired some 300 employees last year.
Last Thursday, crypto lender Genesis laid off 30% of its workforce, leaving 145 employees at the struggling crypto lending firm. This decision follows the The resignation of its CEO, Michael Moro, as well as new executive hires.
On the same day, a spokesperson for its parent company Digital Currency Digital Currency Group (DCG) confirmed that it was closing its wealth management division, HQ, at the end of January. The story was first reported by Information.
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