A hiring crescendo is planned for 2023 by Binance, as CEO Changpeng Zhao announced on Wednesday, going against the gloomy climate in the cryptocurrency market with competitors laying off workers en masse under the weight of the strong selloff in digital currencies.
According to CNBC, Zhao said that Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, was increasing the number of employees in 2022 from 3,000 people to “almost” 8,000.
In 2023, Binance plans to increase its staff numbers by between 15% and 30%, he added.
Competitive exchanges were forced to cut large parts of their workforce after nearly $1.4 trillion disappeared from the market in 2022, while even the major digital currencies, including bitcoin and ether saw their prices plummet.
In November, Kraken announced it was laying off 30% of its staff, and this year Huobi and Coinbase said they would cut 20% of their workforce. This was the second round of layoffs for Coinbase since last year.
Zhao said Binance needs to organize the company “well” before the next bull run in crypto and admitted that the exchange “is not extremely efficient.”
“We will continue to grow and hopefully go up again before the next bull market,” he said.
The market was hit last year by large project collapses, liquidity issues, bankruptcies as well as the most significant of these, that of FTX. Sam Bankman-Fried who founded FTX has been indicted on eight criminal charges by US prosecutors, including fraud. He has pleaded not guilty.
Binance played a major role in the collapse of FTX. In November, it offered to invest in FTX businesses outside the US that were experiencing liquidity problems but then pulled out of the deal. Zhao said publicly that his company was selling its holdings in FTX’s token, FTT, which exacerbated the digital currency’s collapse, adding to FTX’s downward trajectory.
He has stated that he “did not plan” the collapse of FTX.
Responding to a question from CNBC, the Binance CEO said that the “real damage is not that high” to the cryptocurrency industry following the FTX collapse, as he said that the various FTXs “are not big players, they just make a lot of noise.”
“There is definitely damage but the industry will be fine,” Zhao stressed.
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