Nansen joins several blockchain analytics firms that have laid off more than 5% of employees by 2023.
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Blaming "brutal" conditions in the cryptocurrency market and overly aggressive expansion, blockchain analytics supplier Nansen has laid off 43 employees, or 30% of its staff, the company said Forbes.
“This will allow us to focus on our core products with data, analytics and research,” the company said in an email to Forbes. It plans to focus on an updated Nansen dashboard (Nansen V2), and Query Nansena software that gives clients access to curated and individualized blockchain reports.
Nansen backed down from an earlier statement that its marketing and product divisions bore the brunt of the layoffs. A spokesman later said by email that "there was nothing real" to suggest that those teams were more affected than others. “It was across the board,” the spokesperson added.
Nansen said that in addition to the 43 employees laid off yesterday, other vacant positions will not be filled. More than 100 employees remain with the company.
Nansen follows blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, which hacked like 5% of its staff, and crypto-intelligence firm Messari, which cut 15%, both in February.
All the companies cited difficult conditions in the cryptocurrency market, whose value has fallen 14% to $1.18 trillion in the past 12 months, according to data from CoinGecko. However, prices are up 30% this year as digital assets recover from the depths of the 2022 recession.
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Separately, major crypto exchange Binance said Forbes that it was reassessing its staffing "to focus talent density across the organization to ensure we remain agile and dynamic." Ismael García Makroum Talbi, a Binance spokesperson, was responding by email to a request from Forbes for comment on a Twitter Post by journalist Colin Wu that said the company was laying off 20% of its workforce.
“This is not a case of resizing,” Talbi wrote, “but rather, reassessing whether we have the right talent and experience in critical roles and will therefore continue to look to fill hundreds of open roles.
In announcing the layoffs of Nansen the TwitterCEO Alex Svanevik wrote: "Although we have seen revenue diversification across enterprise and institutional clients in the past year, our cost base is too high relative to where the company is today."
He took responsibility for expanding too much. "We wanted to invest and build in a difficult market where others needed to downsize," which led to "taking on acreage that's not really part of Nansen's core strategy." But he added that the company has sufficient funds for "several years" of operations.
Nansen most recently raised $75 million in a series B financing round in December 2021 that valued the company at $750 million, according to data from tone book.
This article was updated on May 31 after the company changed its characterization of which workers were affected by the layoff.
