Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, hopes to continue its hiring spree in 2023 and increase employment by 15-30% in 2023, according to the company’s CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ). This comes just days after reports emerged that the exchange’s biggest competitor, Coinbase, plans to lay off 20% of its workforce and cease most of its operations in Japan.
Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, said it would increase its headcount from 3,000 to "nearly" 8,000 in 2022, Zhao said.
Binance plans to increase its headcount by 15% to 30% by 2023, Zhao told the Crypto Finance conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Rival exchanges are forced to lay off most of their staff after the cryptocurrency market and major digital currencies including bitcoin wipe nearly $1.4 trillion in 2022 and ether saw their prices plummet. In November, Kraken announced layoffs of 30%, this year Huobi and Coinbase said they would lay off 20% of their workforce. This is the second round of layoffs at Coinbase last year. Zhao said Binance needed to get the company "well organized" before the next cryptocurrency bull run, acknowledging that the exchange was "not efficient."
Last year, the industry was plagued by major project crashes, liquidity issues, bankruptcies and the high-profile collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged by U.S. prosecutors with eight criminal counts, including fraud. He pleaded not guilty.
Binance played a major role in the collapse of FTX. In November, Binance offered to acquire FTX’s non-U.S. operations facing liquidity issues, but later backed out of the deal. Zhao’s public statement that his company was selling its holdings in FTX’s native token, FTT, fueled the digital currency’s collapse, adding to FTX’s downward spiral.
