Binance Lays Off 1,000 Employees Globally, Including Indian Workforce

Crypto Exchange Binance has reportedly fired nearly 36 employees in India as part of a cost-cutting and a talent restructuring drive. Over 1,000 employees have been impacted as part of the layoffs undertaken globally in the past few weeks. 

Sources told the Wall Street Journal that the customer services team was ‘heavily affected’ by the retrenchments this week, adding that all layoffs in India pertained entirely to the customer services department. 

As per the report, Binance had more than 8,000 employees on its rolls prior to the mass firings. The global jobs cuts will likely impact a third of the company’s total workforce, and could ‘radically’ diminish the business prospects of the crypto major.

Confirming the development, a Binance spokesperson said, “As we prepare for the next major bull cycle, it has become clear that we need to focus on talent density across the organization to ensure we remain nimble and dynamic. This is not a case of rightsizing, but rather, re-evaluating whether we have the right talent and expertise in critical roles,” he said.

The company refused to divulge any detail on the number of employees that were ousted during the exercise.

The development comes at a time when the crypto giant has been locked in a major regulatory tussle with US authorities which have launched multiple probes against the company in the past few months. While the Securities and Exchange Commission sued the company and its founder Changpeng Zhao for illegally operating in the US and misusing customer funds, the US Department of Justice is expected to soon file charges against the crypto exchange and Zhao. 

The layoffs follow a spree of top-level exits at the company in recent months. Earlier this month, the company’s Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) Patrick Hillmann left the company. Prior to this, the exchange’s general counsel and head of investigations also quit as pressure mounted on the platform from US regulatory authorities. 

With this, Binance joins a growing list of new-age Indian and global tech startups that have laid off employees in the past one and a half years. The crypto space has especially been under the spotlight since the collapse of crypto giant FTX and many other companies amid a purported crypto winter.

The space, which has more or less operated without regulation so far, has also been under the scanner of authorities for lax corporate governance guardrails and opaque functioning. Back home, authorities have even conducted raids at crypto exchanges such as WazirX and CoinSwitch Kuber for allegedly laundering money. Binance had also come under scrutiny in India after a public fallout broke out between Zhao and WazirX cofounder Nischal Shetty over the ownership and supposedly failed acquisition deal of WazirX. 

In the past, Zhao has also called India an unfriendly crypto environment owing to the strategy of heavy taxation employed by authorities to dissuade the trading of private digital currencies. As Binance bears the fallout of adverse market conditions and crypto winter, it remains to be seen what lies ahead for the company.