Cryptocurrency company Paxos has laid off 65 employees, or roughly 20% of its workforce, CEO Chad Cascarilla told employees in an email seen by The Block last week.
The move will “allow us to take full advantage of the huge opportunities in tokenization and the future of stablecoins,” Cascarilla wrote.
“Stablecoins will grow tenfold over the next few years and serve as a fulcrum for opening up the financial system through tokenization,” he wrote. “We will continue to remain focused on our core services and deprioritize adjacent services.”
With this move, Paxos plans to phase out its commodities and securities settlement services and focus on asset tokenization and stablecoins, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
According to The Block, Cascarilla wrote that Paxos offered affected employees 13 weeks of severance pay, three months of subsidized health insurance, three months of outplacement assistance, and a two-year extension on the exercise of vesting options.
The company also paid second-quarter bonuses to employees who participated in its quarterly incentive program, as well as providing severance pay and benefits to employees who were approved for parental or sick leave, the paper said.
“Today is a difficult day. I take responsibility for this decision and regret having had to take this path,” Cascarilla wrote, according to Bloomberg.
But Cascarilla said the company He added that Paxos has more than $500 million on its balance sheet and is “in a very strong financial position to be successful.”
The layoffs came about a week after Paxos left. Release Rift Dollar, a yield-bearing stablecoin. But Cascarilla wrote that “launching and scaling new regulated tokens takes time.”
