Polygon Labs, the team focused on building the layer-2 blockchain Polygon, has laid off 60 employees, or about 19% of its staff, according to one post posted Thursday by CEO Marc Boiron.
The Polygon chain is one of the largest layer 2 blockchains focused on Ethereum scaling. It has facilitated over 2.44 billion transactions, deployed more than 1.17 million smart contracts and recorded $12.8 billion in sales volume, according to Website. Polygon Labs is the entity that helps build the blockchain ecosystem.
Boiron said the team’s growth during the last cryptocurrency market “diluted” the qualities she wanted in her employees.
“To move as ambitiously and nimbly as possible where everyone can take ownership of what they do, we need to create an efficient surgical team, with significantly less bureaucracy,” he added. “As a smaller team, we can collaborate more, accelerate challenging projects and perform at our highest potential.”
In the wake of the layoffs, Polygon Labs is giving a 15% increase to the total compensation of its existing employees and “doing away with traditional geo-pay models.” As for those laid off, they will receive two months’ severance and health benefits until the end of the month, where applicable.
Polygon’s token MATIC fell after the news but has since rebounded around unchanged levels on the day, CoinMarketCap data shows.
Earlier this week, Jack Dorsey’s fintech firm Block, whose subsidiaries include Square, Cash App and Afterpay, also laid off staff, reportedly around 1,000 people, or 10% of its team.
Last year, Ava Labs, OpenSea, Yuga Labs and Chainalysis were among a handful of crypto companies that had layoffs in the fourth quarter, the data showed. OpenSea was the largest with 50% of its staff was cut in early November.
Across the tech world, for both large and small companies, there have been major layoffs. In 2024, about 107 tech companies had layoffs, with nearly 30,000 people affected, according to data from Layoffs.fyi.
This quarter, there have already been more tech job cuts than the previous two quarters, and we’re only one month into the four-month period.
