The market has not been kind or pretty for Bitcoin and altcoins for the last year. For the former, going from $20,000 to all the way down to less than $4,000 has affected every sector of the cryptocurrency industry, including blockchain projects based on a digital asset. And as the market still shows a volatile behavior, it is not clear what the future may hold.
The present is harsh, to say the least, to the company managing the Nebulas blockchain project. Although the crypto market collapse is not the only reason explaining the latest developments, it is among the primary ones: the firm just cut its team from 80 people to only 30, according to a specialized crypto news site.
50 People Lost their Jobs
It is a 50-people cut, which represents a 60% of the staff. Nebulas made headlines in August 2018 because it chose to delay its token distribution decisions and announced that it would hold onto founders’ coins for a decade.
Sadly, Nebulas has suffered the harsh reality of the crypto markets these days and has been forced to implement some changes, mainly layoffs of peripheral, non-vital elements to its roadmap, until its NAS token shows signs of life, which is far from a sure thing given the current state of the industry.
According to Becky Lu, which is the spokesperson for the company, “one of the reasons was the market price kept going down.” The statement was offered to the same crypto news site that reported the cut in staff members.
NAS’ current market cap is around $25.7 million at the moment of writing this article. The protocol behind NAS is supposed to measure and score other blockchains. The NAS token opened at $2, but is now exchanging hands at a fraction of that price: a little over a quarter of that. It is no longer a top 100 cryptocurrency.
According to Lu, the dismissals began last year, mostly in Beijing, which is where the vast majority of the team provides its professional services. The bear market has forced Nebulas to tighten its strategy.
“Another reason we decided to cut off the unimportant projects like third-party wallets [was that they are] not core to the main tech visions mentioned in the [Nebulas] white paper. So the dev team of that project was first impacted,” she stated.
A Global Phenomenon
The Nebulas case is just the latest sign that the current bear market is severely affecting not only cryptocurrencies, but other blockchain-based industries as well. Similar scenarios have presented themselves in companies such as ConsenSys, Bitmain, ShapeShift, and BlockEx. However, Nebulas’ 60 percent staff cut is among the most extreme reported in recent times.
The most noteworthy aspect of the mass dismissal is that just seven months ago, the team managed to raise more than $60 million on its token sale. Nebulas has even launched incentive programs for members of the community and developers alike, showing steady progress. It has published a tool to measure the quality of data on blockchains, named NOVA testnet.
According to Lu, there is still enough “runaway” for a couple of years. “Now that the team has accomplished most of the tech development, the main job for this year is to build up the community government and consensus to achieve full decentralization,” she concluded.
By Andres Chavez
