Crypto exchange Kraken has laid off a portion of its staff in a move toward “leaner and faster” operations, and has appointed longtime board member Arjun Sethi as co-CEO and blockchain vet Stephanie Lemmerman as CFO.
The firm made the three announcements Thursday but did not detail who the layoffs affected. About 15%, or roughly 400 of the company’s 2,600 employees, were cut from Kraken’s workforce, including former operations chief Gilles BianRosa and technology chief Vishnu Patankar, The New York Times reported, citing two unnamed sources.
“As we’ve grown north of $1 billion in net revenue as a remote organization worldwide, we fell into the trap of building organizational layers,” co-CEOs Dave Ripley and Sethi wrote in a blog post on the layoffs. “We are making organizational discipline decisions to tackle this problem and eliminate layers.”
They didn’t provide severance information but wrote that the company “will support [those affected] during this transition.”
“We need to make sure our top contributors are focused on building rather than managing,” they wrote. “This means we give more power to our leaders to build best-in-class products, leverage data to make decisions that are best for our clients, and make engineering, product and design teams all feel more accountable for results.”
A spokesperson for the company declined to comment further.
Kraken’s layoffs come days after another crypto firm, Consensys, cut 20% of its staff. Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin chalked up the cuts to challenging macroeconomic conditions and ongoing regulatory uncertainty.
Several other crypto firms have laid off staff this year, including Paxos and MoonPay, amid a trend of layoffs in the broader fintech sector.
Leadership and launches
Sethi, Kraken’s newly minted co-CEO, is “someone who gets things done,” Kraken co-founder and board chair Jesse Powell said in a statement. “[Y]ou can see that through the many companies he's helped in his career, as a founder and as an investor.”
Sethi is a co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Tribe Capital and a former Yahoo! executive.
Powell said Sethi has helped Kraken navigate tough challenges during his board tenure.
Tapping Lemmerman as finance chief is a step toward Kraken’s goal to one day go public, Ripley said.
“She brings a powerful combination of financial leadership and a deep understanding of finance functions, both of which will be critical for our future plans,” he said.
Lemmerman is filling the shoes of Carrie Dolan, who announced her intentions to step away as CFO this year. Dolan intends to support Kraken through the leadership transition, the firm said.
Also Thursday, Kraken launched a desktop trading app, allowing active traders to capitalize on real-time market movements more effectively through a suite of features. The launch follows a period in beta.
“Active traders play a crucial role in providing the crypto market with liquidity and facilitating price discovery, but to date there are very few platforms that are designed with this important cohort in mind,” said Clark Moody, Kraken Desktop’s senior engineering manager in a prepared statement. “Kraken Desktop provides active traders with the powerful tools they need to further elevate their trading experience and their overall engagement in the crypto market.”
The desktop trading app follows the announcement of a launch-to-come: Ink, Kraken’s own blockchain, which debuts to customers early next year.
