Celsius Lays Off 150 Employees as Crypto Winter Deepens (Report)

According to a recent report, Celsius Network has fired about a quarter of its employees. This comes just days after the company issued a statement, reassuring once again that it’s working around the clock to resume withdrawals and fix its liquidity issues.

• Citing a note that it had obtained over the weekend, the Israeli media outlet Calcalist reported the news that the crypto lender laid off around 150 of its employees amid its ongoing struggles.
• The company’s Linkedin page currently says it has 651 staff members, meaning that the fired ones represent approximately a quarter.
• Just a few days ago, Celsius published a statement indicating that they “are focused and working as quickly as we can to stabilize liquidity and operations.”
• As with previous messages, the firm didn’t reveal any specific steps it had taken to resolve its issues. The blog post reads:

“We continue to take important steps to preserve and protect assets and explore options available to us. The options include pursuing strategic transactions as well as restructuring of our liabilities, among other avenues.”

• Once more, Celsius asked its community for more time as these “exhaustive explorations are complex and take time.”
• Celsius halted withdrawals, among all other network services, in the middle of June and has yet to restart them.
• Since then, the company has hired restructuring lawyers, paused AMAs and Twitter Spaces, and reports emerged that the CEO – Alex Mashinsky – tried to flee the US but was stopped by local authorities. Yet, the team denied these rumors.
• While existing investors reportedly refuted to bail out the company, Goldman Sachs is purportedly trying to raise $2 billion to buy Celsius’ crypto assets at a discount. Nexo also offered to purchase them.
• At the same time, the cryptocurrency winter continues with multiple companies laying off employees and hedge fund 3AC filing for bankruptcy.