Crypto exchange Kraken is laying off 15% of its staff

It is a turbulent time for the major cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. Last Wednesday, the trading platform announced that it will lay off 15% of its staff as part of a corporate restructuring. This means that 400 jobs will be cut, leaving Kraken with approximately 2,200 active employees. In addition, a new co-chief executive has been announced.

It is notable that a number of senior officials within Kraken have also been dismissed, including Chief Operating Officer (COO) Gilles BianRosa and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Vishnu Patankar.

Slimmer and faster

Current CEO Dave Ripley will share his role with Arjun Sethi, an experienced Silicon Valley executive. Both CEOs highlighted their ambition to become the largest cryptocurrency platform in the world in an official blog post on the Kraken website:

“To continue on our path forward and put Kraken in contention to become the largest crypto platform in the world, we need to be leaner and faster.”

Not Kraken’s first round of layoffs

This is not the first time that Kraken has implemented a major reorganization. In 2022, the company already laid off around 1,100 employees, which amounted to around 30% of its workforce. This round of layoffs followed the shocking bankruptcy of FTX.

Although the situation seems chaotic, co-CEO Sethi explains in the blog post that the company has nevertheless managed to increase its turnover, which has now risen to $1 billion. The current round of layoffs is an effort to reduce costs and improve organizational efficiency so that profitability can further increase.

Kraken remains one of the larger exchanges

Kraken is currently the sixth largest cryptocurrency exchange, according to figures from CoinMarketCap. The platform offers support for almost 360 different coins and has a daily trading volume of almost $800 million. Yet Kraken remains significantly smaller than Binance, which handles more than $14 billion in trading volume daily.