The cryptocurrency exchange Firecoin plans to lay off 20% of its staff during the "cryptocurrency winter"! According to a statement to Reuters recently, Huobi Global, the cryptocurrency exchange, confirmed that it planned to lay off 20% of its staff in the current "bear market". Previously, the cryptocurrency industry had been in the trend of layoffs in the market fluctuations.

"The proportion of planned layoffs is about 20%," the Huo Yuan spokesman said in a statement. "In the current bear market, a very streamlined team will continue to be maintained."

Firecoin currently has 1100 employees and has not implemented the layoff plan.

Previously, it was reported that the exchange was insolvent. Sun Yuchen, the founder of the Tron blockchain, became the consultant and public spokesman of Huo Coin in October. He denied these reports on Twitter on January 5, saying that the business was "good" and the "security" users' assets would always be fully protected. "

The representative of the company also commented that the bankruptcy report was untrue and that the layoffs were aimed at "optimizing the structure" and "improving efficiency".

According to the data from the analysis website CoinGecko, the native HT token of Firecoin has dropped by nearly 11% to US $4.64 in the past 24 hours. The capital outflow of the exchange has also increased in the past week, and its total trading volume has decreased from $443 million in the past 24 hours to $366 million.

Firecoin was rated by CoinGecko as the eighth largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of trading volume in November, and has attracted 12 million visitors. Sun added that the platform has attracted an average of 20000 new users every day in the past three months.

The news of layoffs was first reported by Wu Kelin, who said that the Exchange planned to lay off about 40% of its 1200 employees and cut the salaries of senior employees.

A recent follow-up action said that employees were required to receive wages in stable currencies such as USDC and USDT, and those who could not receive wages would be dismissed. Wu said that the move "triggered protests from some employees".

In the harsh bear market known as "crypto winter", layoffs have dealt a heavy blow to the cryptocurrency industry. Some cryptocurrency markets such as Bitcoin have fallen by more than 60% since January 2022. On Thursday, Silvergate Capital Corp., a cryptocurrency banking platform, cut 40% of its workforce and Genesis Global Trading Inc., a cryptocurrency lending agency, cut 30% of its workforce after cutting 20% in August.

Before that, there were a series of layoffs in other cryptocurrency companies, including 30% layoffs in Kraken, 18% layoffs in Coinbase Inc., 30% layoffs in Crypto.com and 30% layoffs in Bitmex. Dapper Labs, a non-homogeneous token market, laid off 22% of its staff in November.