Australian Gaming Start-up Immutable Lays off 11% of Workforce

The biggest cryptocurrency gaming start-up in Australia, Immutable, is laying off 11% of its staff, reported the Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday.

The news comes despite Immutable obtaining venture capital (VC) funding over the last two years, the news outlet highlighted. According to reports, the corporation collected A$280 million ($191 million) in March 2022, which put the cryptocurrency gambling business’ value at A$3.5 billion ($2.39 billion).

Immutable Moves to Optimize Resources

The papers also obtained a letter from the business’s chief executive and co-founder, James Ferguson, in which the company justified the layoffs on the necessity to maximize the life of its cash reserves and direct resources to core projects.

“This is difficult news, and I am sorry to all Immutables impacted by these changes,” Ferguson was quoted as saying. “As CEO, I am deeply aware that these role eliminations will directly impact the lives of many, and I take full ownership for these actions.”

The newspaper cites statistics that reveal a loss of roughly $56 million for the entire year. Meanwhile, Immutable holds $558 million in value of tokens and cryptocurrency.

Immutable is the most recent in a line of cryptocurrency businesses to lay off employees in the previous 12 months. Notwithstanding the cryptocurrency market’s current recovery following the FTX meltdown.

Crypto Businesses Restructure

Amid a protracted crypto winter, Ethereum scaling platform Polygon said this week that it is eliminating 100 jobs, or 20% of its personnel, as part of a larger corporate restructuring.

Polygon has experienced layoffs despite having raised $450 million in a fundraising round led by Sequoia India in February 2022. According to reports, the affected workers will each receive three months’ worth of severance compensation.

Alesia Haas, the chief financial officer of Coinbase, recently stated that the platform is also willing to make additional cuts if required to boost the business’ financial performance. The company carried two rounds of layoffs last year.

Within 10 weeks of laying off 12.5% of its workers, the African cross-border payments platform Chipper Cash reportedly conducted another firing this week.  

Immutable is not alone, with the greatest names in technology, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, also actively laying off staffers. With the crypto sector not immune to the broader market sentiments. Magic Eden, a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, also stated that it would dismiss 22 employees as part of “restructuring.”

Notably, the number of layoffs in the cryptocurrency industry was eight to 13 times higher than the average. According to a recent CoinGecko study, this came after the 2022 crashes of the stablecoin Terra and the exchange FTX. The research indicated that the number of crypto layoffs in January 2023 alone surpassed 41% of all layoffs in 2022.