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Binance lays off over 1k Employees
- toomuchtodo 3y agohttps://archive.is/j50GA https://archive.is/j50GA
- WestCoastJustin 3y ago> Binance had a global staff of 8,000 A 12.5% reduction. Also, they are way larger than I thought with 8k employees. I don't know what's involved with running an exchange but they must be into lots of things with that many folks.
- javajosh 3y agoIn some corporate cultures, headcount is its own reward.
- bdcravens 3y agoThey have around 100M registered users, so approximately 1 employee for every 100k users seems reasonable.
- WestCoastJustin 3y agoYes, totally. They probably have tons of support, sales, etc. I'd imagine they have tons of contractors too with that many users. Makes sense now.
- loeg 3y agoThat figure seems implausibly high. 1 in 80 humans on Earth are not only participating in crypto but specifically have an account on Binance? It certainly cannot be the number of active users.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoIf its indeed true, the gap between onchain and offchain users is even more immense. On chain, there are not more than 100k users across chains daily. Real users across all EVM chains is probably around 20k/day. Major airdrops like Optimism and Arbitrum went out to like 600k wallets (and most have multiple wallets). OpenSea has like a few thousand daily active users. Which makes you wonder - all these billions in funding for serving just…100k real users? Because if its not onchain, it might as well be a database.
- schmichael 3y agoIt has been reported that CZ had 300 accounts himself, so like most things in crypto the 100M number is to be taken with a grain of salt.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alfalfasprout 3y agoTo be fair, exchanges are pretty complicated. That said, it seems like a pretty high number.
- tempsy 3y agoyou need a lot of operations people like customer service for an exchange. not really surprising.
- _yb2s 3y agoI don't know if I'm just naive, but I'm always confused when I see such a high headcount for companies with such simple tech, the staff of Twitter (even after mass layoffs) confuses me also. I feel like these companies are solving a relatively simple problem, and a single skilled engineer working full time could probably make and maintain a decent scalable solution.
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- sonicshadow 3y agoTrue sign of the arrogant software engineer, believing they can single-handedly recreate an entire company just because they went to school in one subject for 4 years.
- rognjen 3y agoSuch vitriol! It's safer to assume they're inexperienced than arrogant.
- sonicshadow 3y agoPretty much the definition of arrogance, being inexperienced and still thinking they can do the work of a hundred people
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoI work at one such company and I still think most of us aren't needed. I swear it's 90% red tape and BS holding everyone back. I know I can build things 30x faster outside of work, but I will also confess that it might not meet at the accessibility guidelines and i18n and be user tested and so forth.
- WinstonSmith84 3y agoThere are dozens of protocols they need to integrate with and keep up to date. Plus, those protocols change constantly. And there are also new ones, and those which disappear... And then, there is their whole infrastructure. The support must be massive too. And the legal aspect must also keep people busy from having to enforce various regulations to having to answer to various governments... So let's take a comparison: - facebook: 50k employee. What has changed on Facebook for the last few years? So yes, there is probably some support, the content enforcement of course must keep a lot of people busy, but then?.. - snapchat: 5k employee. Well, for a social media platform which is not changing at all and actually losing in revenue, that's a big number
- atraac 3y ago> facebook: 50k employee. What has changed on Facebook for the last few years? What do you mean? Facebook changes literally every day. Every single day a piece of UI randomly stops working.
- mvdtnz 3y agoYou're assuming (in both the Binance and Facebook cases) that the majority of headcount comes from product development teams. Not true. The majority of that 8k/50k figure comes from areas like sales, compliance, finance, HR and management.
- ecshafer 3y agoNYSE has around 2000 employees. So I think this is more than they need.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 1-more 3y agoOTOH NYSE operates in NY and US jurisdictions right? Binance tries to operate everywhere.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago> Binance tries to operate everywhere. Under which legal jurisdiction does Binance operate? It's not "all of them". I'm not sure that it's "any of them".
- 1-more 3y agoFair cop, haha. It has designs on operating aboveboard I think everywhere on earth right?
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y agoAnd I have designs on flying to the moon by flapping my arms.
- busterarm 3y agoNot even a whole month since the last layoff...
- moneywoes 3y agoInteresting I recall them mentioning how they were resistant to the market turmoil that caused Coinbase to conduct their layoffs
- ansible 3y agoWell, they're also being sued by the SEC...
- zeitgeistcowboy 3y agoThe article says a spokesperson said they "need to focus on talent density." Talent density is a new buzz word to me!
- slt2021 3y agoare they bashing people they laid off, assuming that 1k people were less talented than the rest?
- account-5 3y agoSound like that's exactly what they're doing.
- whimsicalism 3y agoyes
- WinstonSmith84 3y agoNo offence, but that's usually how capitalism works, the least talented are the first to go - unless we're talking about Twitter and then it's about showing off at the office.
- nonameiguess 3y agoI highly doubt that's true. It may be what you want in an ideal world, but in reality, very few, if any, companies of this size have any internal ranking system that can accurately identify the 1000 least talented people company-wide. More likely, they're laying off the last 1000 hired if they want to optimize for losing the least institutional knowledge, the first 1000 hired if they want to optimize for immediate labor cost savings, or just laying off all the people that are part of teams working on projects that got scrapped, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
- adamredwoods 3y agoNever in any layoff I've been a part of, have the least talented workers been let go first. It's usually by category: contractors, age (early-retirement), department, or job description.
- ot 3y ago> It was not easy saying no to Super bowl ads, stadium naming rights, large sponsor deals a few months ago, but we did. Today, we are hiring for 2000 open positions for #Binance. https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1537013824666095617 https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1537013824666095617 Jun 2022, didn't age well.
- koolba 3y ago> Jun 2022, didn't age well. A public statement lasting a year in the Wild West that is crypto isn’t the worst. Though that’s primarily due to the lowness of the bar.
- arp242 3y agoKnew someone who worked at Binance, as support. I'm sure he's competent enough at his job, but he has no special skills or anything. He made more money than I did as a senior software dev at the time. It seems not only did they hire a lot of people, they also paid them an ungodly amount of money.
- benreesman 3y agoI haven’t paid any serious attention to crypto-type markets in a while but historically BTC/USDT was a pretty good number to look at if you could only look at one and it’s (glances)…whoa back above 30k? That’s not like peak tulip or even close but historically like, high-ish I think. I don’t particularly feel like reading the entrails of the crypto chicken at the moment so I’m going to assume that the crypto market (including the perpetual futures and stuff where Binance makes the big bucks) isn’t lying in ruins. I’m sure someone will let me know if that’s way off. 8 thousand people is not a lot for a company doing trillions of dollars of transactions in dozens of countries most which have at least some regulation. That would be a lot if they were all engineers and quants, but even there, an electronic stock market is a tricky little devil to build and operate. So is this a bad outlook for crypto, a serious setback in the various regulatory battles, or just another brick in the wall of what is increasing looking like Don’t Poach Gate 2.0? (Sorry Bond Villains, the kids were going to hear about that eventually.)
- davidgerard 3y agonumber is one thing, but volume is through the floor
- MuffinFlavored 3y agoHow much is it down % wise compared to what period previously?
- davidgerard 3y agosolid numbers are sometimes not so easy to find - you should presume that any number in crypto that could be faked is being faked - but there's clearly been a serious decline. Coinbase reveals in 10-K and 10-Q filings how it's lost over 75% of retail customers, i.e. the guys who supply the scarce actual dollars to crypto. CoinDesk has been running regular articles on how it's down, e.g. * https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/07/05/crypto-trading-volumes-rise-for-first-time-in-3-months-amid-etf-optimism/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/07/05/crypto-trading-v... - "Still, spot trading volumes remain at historically low levels. Spot trading volume in the second quarter was the lowest since Q4 2019, according to the report." * https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/06/15/crypto-trading-volumes-drop-in-q2-to-yearly-lows/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/06/15/crypto-trading-v... - "Average daily volumes for the second quarter of 2023 were $10 billion for the top 10 tokens (excluding stablecoins), compared to $18 billion average daily volumes in the first quarter of the year." this is important, because a thin market means the price is more easily fakeable. The TrueUSD stablecoin seems to have lost its backing recently, but simultaneously with that Binance somehow printed $2b worth of TrueUSD. What could you do to the bitcoin price if you had $2b of fake money to do it with?
- RyanAdamas 3y agoWe just need a law that bans cryptographic exchanges and transfers in the USA. They are not assets, they provide no real utility, they are just speculative devices that no longer function as originally intended; as a replacement for fiat currency. So, it simply needs to be outlawed and all the money repatriated into whatever currency it came from; most of it dollars.
- arbol 3y agoThis seems pretty out of touch. They're the first challenger to fiat currencies ever. Outlawing them will stifle any innovation that arises from their development.
- Tao3300 3y ago> the first challenger to fiat currencies ever Except they fail at that. Any further innovation will be more of the same: grift.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> They're the first challenger to fiat currencies ever. Direct commodity and commodity-representational currencies were the first challengers to fiat currencies, and for about the first millenium after the first know fiat was introduced, generally won. Cryptocurrency is not the “first challenger to fiat currency ever”.
- chrisco255 3y agoNothing is ever "won". The world remains as dynamic as ever. Pride comes before fall, as they say. Also, until the 70s, USD was backed by gold.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Nothing is ever "won". Yes, the simple past (“for the first millenium after the 10th century introduction of fiat, commodity currency alternatives mostly won”) has different meaning than the past perfect (“commodity currencies have won the battle with fiat currencies”), and I choose which one I used for the exact meaning intended. > Also, until the 70s, USD was backed by gold. Yes, the US dollar until recently was most of the time a commodity (either direct in coins traded for their metalli1a13@c value, or representational in redeemable notes) currency, part of the millenium of triumph of commodity over fiat.
- ForOldHack 3y agoHow did they have 1000 people in the first place?
- peschu 3y agoThe article saysthat they had 8000 before layoffs started... What are all these people doing at an exchange? Maybe they work with orders on paper in the background? :D
- retube 3y agoThey operate in 100 countries, have 30m users, support trading in 360 coins PLUS a load of derivatives on top and process $15bn of trades per day. And they are not just "an exchange". They are also custody, clearing and settlements. Frankly I am amazed they are only 8,000.
- peschu 3y agoIdk...throwing around big numbers, implying confidence does not convince me. Also your numbers are mostly not neccessarily related to the amount of workforce needed. For example my blog/website operates theoretically in all countries on the world ...still it's only me needed. I think you get the point. I think a measure like active users is more related to the size than number of countries and coins/tokens ... But it is true I focused a too much on the platform itself etc. They have a lot stuff going on around it for legal, kyc, regulations, Marketing etc ... The operation of the platform itself is probably not the biggest part of their business anymore. But coinbase for example, does it with less than 5000 ... But probably not so easy to compare
- john_max_1 3y agoCompanies don't hire people. Managers do. If I am a Director of Engineering with 5 reports and you are a Director of Engineering with 10 reports then you are going for the VP of Eng role on next promotion. Like it or hate it that's why every company bloats up over time. Company pays salaries. And you enlarge your status.
- ElevenLathe 3y agoIt's pretty insane that they have this many employees to start with. > Before the layoffs, Binance had a global staff of 8,000. The whole thing is self-evidently a massive scam! There are still 7,000 people working there!
- SamReidHughes 3y agoBinance is a crypto exchange. Where's the scam?
- thrwbin 3y ago[flagged]
- theusus 3y agoI remember getting an interview opportunity a couple of months ago. And the hiring manager said they are going fine. Didn't age well
- robocat 3y agoOff topic, but Binance UI and onboarding is a complete tipster fire. A binance user asked me to pay USD40 using binance: I went through the process of signing up - it was incredibly difficult with significant roadblocks at every step - horrific UI choices. A company that fails to onboard a paying user is not going to do well. The only reason I made it through the onboarding was that I was very stubborn and I have sufficient knowledge to eventually work past the worst UI blocks. It was an extremely frustrating and confusing process. Even once I had passed the KYC compliance and got money deposited (more nightmare), the UI is still a shitfest of unclear usability. So many obvious failures at every step. Also they had an incentive system to refer someone, but it appears to be completely broken so even their signup incentives are a failure. I have never had such a poor experience trying to give a company some money.
- mythrwy 3y agoTheir trading platform used to be awesome though although I haven't been on it since they banned US users 5 or 6 years ago. It was very well done in my opinion.
- throwaway5959 3y agoContractors on the Death Star.
- resolutebat 3y ago> As we prepare for the next major bull cycle, it has become clear that we need to focus on talent density across the organization to ensure we remain nimble and dynamic. This is not a case of rightsizing, but rather, re-evaluating whether we have the right talent and expertise in critical roles. This is some next level PR "major bull" right here. Not only are they claiming with a straight face that these are not layoffs, but they're saying it's happening because crypto is about to rocket to the moon! (As opposed to, say, Binance being currently raked over the coals by every financial regulator on the planet.)
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- michelb 3y agoI deleted my Binance account last month but still get service email (because I'm a 'client') without the ability to unsubscribe or turn it off (I have no account). All contact is ignored. Great company.