Crypto infrastructure provider Qredo has been forced to tighten its belt, announcing extensive job cuts amid the prevailing bearish market. Says who? Well, according to some carefully placed informants, Qredo is terminating around 50 staff members, a drastic reduction including several key players. Two high-profile cuts include the likes of Gabriele Farei, the former Chief Product Officer, and Asen Taskov, the outgoing Chief Information Security Officer.
Weaving through the maze of undisclosed confirmations, an insider reportedly indicates that after the forced exodus, the firm’s headcount is likely to hover around 130. In a brief interaction, a Qredo representative confirmed the development, blaming it on an unrelenting crypto winter while cagily thwarting the specifics. The lay-offs, they reveal, are part of Qredo’s resizing strategy aimed at refocusing their efforts to pocket savings of around 50%.
This belt-tightening comes in the wake of the infrastructure provider weathering the storm under the weight of the crypto winter, but where does Qredo fit into the crypto ecosystem? Apparently, the firm is pegged on an MPC-based asset custody protocol. Its novel implementation solves the pressing issue of private key storage while mitigating access control challenges, not to mention the reduced counterparty risk.
The walled garden of Qredo’s protocol records ownership of Layer 1 assets via its proprietary Qredochain. The firm preserves the records with signatures secured by an architecture known as a distributed multi-party computation network. Fundamentally, Qredo gets its bread and butter via transaction fees denominated in its QRDO token. Qredo employs a unique dMPC network to offer a decentralized custody for decentralized assets, using customers’ fragmented private keys among secure vaults, thereby ramping up the security level.
Starting off in 2018, Qredo rose to a respectable $460 million valuation by February 2022, courtesy of an impressive $80 million Series A funding round, taking its tally to a grand total of approximately $94 million.
Qredo’s somewhat survivalist strategy is not an isolated case, as multiple crypto ventures opt for snipping staff amid the global crypto downturn. Coinbase, the widely recognized exchange, too, is looking to stay afloat, slashing jobs in three successive events throughout last year, leading to a 20% workforce reduction. In fact, the majority of major crypto exchanges are in the same boat, trying to brave the choppy crypto winter waters.
Source: Cryptonews
