Banxa, an Australian cryptocurrency exchange gateway, has said that it will be laying off 40 percent of its employees. When Banxa common shares were first put on the Toronto Stock Exchange in January, the exchange gave each share a ticker symbol so it could be traded. Here they are talking about Icon Blockchain that can be used for cryptocurrency exchange.
The price went up by more than 90 percent after the listing, which led to a spectacular rise. Since then, though, the value of cryptocurrencies has gone down, which is why the price of the stock has gone down by more than 70%.
In May, the Australian company said that its sales were 99 times higher than the previous year. The company also created new legal corporations in both the U.S. and Turkey. The year before, Banxa had a record-high 250 employees. But Holger Arians, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, says the company hired too many people.
Banxa is working to lower the costs of running the business
After the cryptocurrency market crashed, the company’s CEO said: “painful steps” were needed to get back on track. In recent months, the company started working on a plan to lower its operating costs. One step was to stop all of the company’s internal events, like galas, by the end of May.
Also, the company held a meeting for all employees on Wednesday morning. Since the market was getting worse, CEO Holger Arians told the meeting that the company had grown too quickly. As a direct result of this, he made it clear that the current organizational structure needs to be reworked a lot, which will mean a lot of job cuts.
Banxa will also combine most of the company’s operations in the Philippine and Australian markets. Jan Lorenc, the business’s managing director for Europe, has also decided to leave. Lorenc was in charge of Banxa’s efforts to expand into new European markets, and he was also in charge of managing these efforts.
A Banxa representative said the company will soon cut back and focus more on its goals. Even though the market is facing problems right now, it would be able to focus on increasing its margins and profits.
The company’s representative made the following comment
Banxa’s many payment options and compliance systems are becoming more useful to web2 and web3 artists and networks. The company has been around for a long time and has been through most of an ecosystem’s cycles.
The public can look at both the entity’s financial records and the company’s book of accounts. The company’s accounting book is reliable. The recent round of layoffs at Banxa is just one example of how the wave of outsourcing jobs overseas has destroyed the Australian labor market. Startups in cryptocurrency and technology are being hit the hardest.
Painful adjustments
In an email to his coworkers, Mr. Arians said that the Banxa leadership team was “serious” about the news of the layoffs. He told Banxa that if they didn’t take “decisive actions” right away to cut costs, their company wouldn’t be able to do well in their industry in the long run.
A part of the message said that Banxa was still going to attack, even though they had changed their strategy a lot. The amount of money they spend on their employees is still too high for them to work well with the way they are set up.
The company wanted to make more small but steady changes across the whole organization. But because of bigger things, their timeline changed, which stopped that from happening. Because of this, the people in charge of Banxa were put under even more pressure to make the needed changes to how the company handles its costs.
Mr. Arians thinks that the company’s leaders still believe in the business’s potential. They want to be a vital part of the web3 ecosystem. Over the last 18 months, Banxa’s rate of growth has been going up. But the CEO said that the sudden drop in the value of cryptocurrency markets was bad for the company.
The group worked hard to make sure the huge amount of trade went smoothly. Also, so they could provide better services, they invested in both new products and new markets. But because the economy is slowing, they have to cut costs quickly.
