> Since the start of this year, macroeconomic and geopolitical factors have weighed on financial markets.
This is an incredible couching of the last 9 months of cryptocurrency market behavior. Does anybody actually operate on their belief that "geopolitical factors," rather than astonishing amounts of fraud, are responsible for the current downturn?
We learned about the fraud because of macroeconomic factors!
inflation -> rising interest rates -> crypto less attractive [0] -> people ask for their deposits back -> company can't meet obligations -> company folds -> scrutiny -> fraud revealed
Is my basic model of things.
[0] from https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/th...: "When interest rates are very low a dollar in the far future is worth almost as much as a dollar today. Thus, in a regime of low interest-rates, crypto and other projects with (speculative) long-run payoffs could be valued highly. As interest rates rose, however, long-run speculative returns began to look much less attractive than say T-bills and money flocked out of assets in the long-run sector causing prices to plummet."
I completely agree! My point was that it's very funny to blame the macro (and even funnier to blame geopolitics), when it's clearly just serving a revelatory purpose.
So you're saying that when I get arrested for public indecency, my defense should start with "due to tidal forces and the changing orientation of our Moon, my nether region emerged above the water's surface"
My advice is to repeat Warren Buffet's adage -- "only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked" -- and adamantly deny that it has any non-literal meaning whatsoever.
Warren was just telling us about something he observed at the beach one time
Swimming naked feels great and is plainly superior to swimming in a bathing suit. If you read between the lines, Buffet was clearly recommending that everyone swim naked and put their full net worth into crypto.
Rising inflation and correspondant rising interest rates would have resulted in a major crypto market decline with or without the fraud. Bitcoin had already fallen from $60k+ to ~$20k before the waves of failures even began happening.
All of cryptocurrency is a risk asset. When credit and money is cheap and flowing freely, it flows into risk assets like crypto, driving up their price and forming bubbles. When rates rise and credit and money is no longer flowing freely, it flows out of risk assets into safer havens, popping the bubbles. That's what happened to crypto this year.
The collapses and fraud revelations were a consequence of that, not the cause. Blaming the macro is accurate.
Close, almost 14yrs. Launched Jan 2009. Bitcoin's economic design incentivizes saving rather than spending, so it's no big surprise that's what's happening. DeFi currently is all about using loans to make money speculating, so yeah, but it's still kinda new so jury's still out on whether it might develop into something more broadly useful.
I'm not an economist, but it does seem like the inflation is primarily attributable to geopolitical factors: the various spending programs countries embarked on during the pandemic, China's zero-Covid policy, the Russian invasion of Ukraine putting a premium on both oil and grain.
Are you suggesting that crypto is to blame for inflation? how would that work?
For the life of me I cannot understand how every single layoff notice talks about "macroeconomic factors."
Inflation and interest rates are up - okay. But real GDP growth (in the US at least) has been positive. Why is everybody acting like unemployment is at 8%, GDP growth is sharply negative, and consumer spending is way down?
At least with crypto stuff it makes sense that these companies are losing shitloads of money but with so many companies it seems to be "we expect to be making less money next year so we are cutting staff now."
*Growth* is down in certain sectors. Many companies were staffing to support and capture possible future growth. When next year is expected to look like this year, a lot fewer people are actually needed.
Most companies are to some extent financed with debt. When interest rates go up and loans need to be rolled over they will pay a higher interest rate. The result is a deleveraging (companies taking on less debt) but also reducing expenses (layoffs). The relationship between interest rates and inflation is also usually not linear - ie. inflation is 8% on average, you can charge 8% more for your products but your interest payments might very well double (going from 4% to 8% p.a.).
The current layoffs are concentrated in the tech sector because that sector experienced huge growth when everybody was stuck at home. With that now over, it’s just a regression to the mean and employment trends are going back to being in line with the rest of the economy.
As is true in traditional finance as well. If you want to escape fraud altogether you might as well not have any wealth. The entire 2008 financial crises was due to fraud...
People are still defrauded without wealth. See loan sharks, for example, or people arguing you should use debt to invest in the newest crypto hype. So even that escape hatch does not work.
In fairness, Kraken is regulated and I suspect can't be involved in any of the crypto scams. I'd imagine they really hold deposits as they should etc.
So for them it's the fact that markets are down and people aren't punting crypto, rather than "we took the USD deposits, turned them into shit coins and we're insolvent" kind of thing.
Right: to be absolutely clear, I'm not accusing Kraken of anything untoward (at least, nothing more untoward than being involved in this whole industry).
The statement just came across as very roundabout: we all understand that the current downturn in cryptocurrency is driven in part by a decline in "easy money" from retail customers, which in turn is partially driven by a lot of that "easy money" outright evaporating from fraudulent schemes.
Ok, I just meant, when SBF comes out and says, "liquidity crunch, bank run", he means, he stole the money, or charitably, let someone steal it on his watch. Or even more charitably, invested it in an unacceptably stupid way.
For Kraken the slowdown is less business. Crypto is down, as are equity markets, and these are highly correlated (go figure - "inflation hedge").
I'm not even sure if FTX blow up itself is bad for them. Not only is a competitor out, but also people might appreciate a regulated crypto exchange.
So I think maybe "geopolitical" is not outrageously wrong a term to use here.
Didn't I read recently that Meta, Google, and all those companies are laying off people? Not going to talk about Twitter because that's a special case ;).
As a side note, I really like the framing of "operate on their belief"
> Does anybody actually operate on their belief that "geopolitical factors," rather than astonishing amounts of fraud, are responsible for the current downturn?
What people believe is such a slippery question, especially when those people are participating in or proximate to fraud. It might even be a category error. But pivoting to "operate on" moves the discussion from something unknowable to looking at observable behavior. It's along the lines of "Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value," in that it can skip over whole swathes of PR and other BS.
Macro weighs more on crypto than geopolitics or fraud. Fraud never deterred millions from dumping savings, reputations and careers into this mess. The inflection point, for crypto, as with other risk assets, was the Fed.
I don't disagree, but: macro is a forcing function for the collapse of fraudulent schemes. If it was just a macro downturn, we would be seeing a filter between different firms. Instead we're seeing an implosion roughly every month, interspersed with bankruptcies and major headcount cuts.
The fraud seems to get political very quickly with FTX. Sam Bankman donated enormous amounts of money to democrats. He was the second biggest donor behind George Soros. He said he also donated an equivalent amount to establishment republicans via dark money channels.
Sam Bankman was clearly a smooth political operator.You don't have meeting with Gary Gensler the head of the SEC otherwise.
> Sam Bankman was clearly a smooth political operator
No, he wasn’t. This is a myth he crafted for his retail audience. He threw money around. But D.C. is filled with schmucks buying photo ops for millions of dollars.
> don't have meeting with Gary Gensler the head of the SEC otherwise
You’re saying SBF’s donations, and not his role as CEO of FTX, got him a meeting with FTX’s regulator?
Yeah, if I were one of FTX's regulators, I would be fascinated to meet with him. Or any other big-name crypto person. Assuming they're brave enough to set foot on US territory at all, that is.
> Sam Bankman-Fried’s donations to Democrats are well documented. In an interview released Tuesday, the former FTX CEO said he similarly funded Republican campaigns—but kept it quiet.
> “All my Republican donations were dark,” SBF told crypto influencer and YouTuber Tiffany Fong, referring to political donations that aren’t publicly disclosed. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the fuck out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”
The point of political donations (at this scale) is not to get your preferred candidate elected. It is to get leverage with the candidate who ends up getting elected.
I do. Crypto obviously has a big fraud problem which has infected most if not all of the ecosystem, but I don't think that's the actual reason for the downturn. Crypto has always had a fraud problem and it hasn't scared people and gullible suckers away before. I think outside factors are what drives the speculation.
I think at current moment it is pretty much been shown that crypto is no hedge against other financial markets. It is entirely correlated. And then it has it own host of issues and probably have enough players who can't handle downturn in market...
Sorry for the confusion. I agree that macro trends are having an effect; I think some of the other threads have a good amount of elaboration on the interaction between the macro economic climate and the crypto downturn (and particularly, why crypto's unique vulnerability to downturns makes it funny to place blame on the broader market).
My understanding is the crypto prices are driven primarily by the amount of liquidity injected in the market. Or, at least, that’s the case in the current cycle. Fraud is bad, but it has less impact.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine had a very strong impact on investor willingness. It indicated a new period of uncertainty where people preferred having their cash in stable vehicles.
I've seen startups struggle to raise in March when less attractive competitors raised with ease in February.
Crypto simply followed the overall market effects. People cashed out with the economic downturn on the profits they made, just as they did the stock market.
Also, practically every asset class has a member that went to zero. The question is what fraction, and how did the others do. If you bought a basket of super-risky assets, over the past years, they went up like crypto and down less.
"decile" means 10%, are you intending to claim that the riskiest 10% of stocks are down on average at least 1000%? That seems like a pretty strong claim that needs some backing...
Options very well can be down more than 100%. It's a leveraged bet and a very common vehicle in traditional finance. So much so you can buy/sell them on platforms like Robinhood.
> a leveraged bet and a very common vehicle in traditional finance
Former options market maker here. Taking leveraged, directional risk with options is textbook reckless trading. That Robinhood found people to swing options and crypto is not representative of traditional finance.
I have an options account with TD Ameritrade. It took a few clicks to get. But it's pretty convenient traditional finance can be redefined when needed.
This doesn't change what the GP said. I have an options account with my bank too, but I had to sign all kinds of disclosures and wait to be approved. I also had to demonstrate a minimum net worth.
What made Robinhood (originally) unique was stripping away those protections, or otherwise automating them away in a mobile app. We have lots of concrete examples of people losing their life's savings on Robinhood, in no small part because of how easy it made leveraging oneself.
You are right. If you are referring to the GP of my post I agree with them - there are many growth stocks down more than crypto at the moment. That was what I was trying to say but did so poorly. I was just clarifying what I meant by thousands of % since I was thinking of options when I wrote it.
Your knowledge around opening an options account is slightly outdated. They used to have net worth requirements and more legal forms. Some time around 2020 though at the beginning of the pandemic all of this was removed. It's a few clicks now at pretty much any major investment bank such as TD Ameritrade.
Sure if you are being pedantic you got me. I was just trying to make the point that there are very risky positions you can hold in traditional finance as well and you can be down thousands of percent.
> Crypto is performing far worse than even the riskiest decile of the stock market. Which should surprise nobody.
> This is not true. The riskiest stocks are down thousands of %.
I mean, sure looks like you were trying to argue that crypto isn't performing worse than the riskiest decile of the stock market, which just isn't true at all.
It is though. There are plenty of growth stocks down 80%. Many of which were being pushed heavily by the Youtube finance crowd. The same ones peddling FTX (cough)...
Just because you can find some individual stocks that are down 80% (and keeping in mind that 80% != thousands lol), doesn’t mean that the most volatile decile of the stock market hasn’t outperformed crypto.
The iShares Small Cap Growth ETF (which is a probably a decent proxy for the most volatile companies in the market) is only down 13% on the year.
A long position in an option can't be down more than 100%.
The only commonly traded way to lose more than you started with are futures (not available on most retail platforms) and CFDs (not legal in many markets, including the USA).
Selling an uncovered call in theory (or selling a stock short) opens you to infinite losses - though brokerages are loathe to give you this capability it does exist.
Sure, but that's not what's being discussed in this thread.
"The riskiest stocks are down thousands of %" is untrue regardless of whether that position was in regular shares or /r/WSB style 10,000 calls expiring Friday.
This is true but all that it proves is that Bitcoin is incredibly volatile.
It seems like the pro-crypto arguments end up being circular sometimes (not from the same person but the community).
If the market is good, it's a great investment.
If the market is bad, buy the dip!
If it's unstable, remember all thos people who made money?
If it's stable, well it's a currency after all.
There are so many people who view crypto differently there's always someone there to sing it's praises. I'll still have no idea what crypto is supposed to be aside from a vehicle for fraud.
It's almost like the fundamental basis of crypto is fraud. Like they're not actually selling anything, besides "british south sea company" ~~stock shares~~ coins.
Every tulip bubble is full of fraud. Those markets are chalk full of people looking to get rich quick, and many people looking to get rich quick are willing to do it in a less than scrupulous way.
At least they're handling it responsibly and generously:
From their blog:
Separation pay: We will pay 16 weeks of base pay for all departing Krakenites inclusive of the paid leave period.
Performance bonus: For those eligible, we will pay each departing Krakenite their bonus as determined by their manager.
Benefits: We will offer eligible Krakenites 4 months of healthcare continuation coverage inclusive of the paid leave period. All Krakenites will continue to have access to counseling services during this period.
Extension of exercise window: We will extend departing Krakenites’ window to exercise their vested stock options.
Immigration support: Kraken will provide dedicated visa and immigration support for those currently on company-sponsored visas.
Outplacement support: We will provide career support for departing Krakenites, including networking opportunities, job search best practices, interview guidance, and more.
Not for everyone. First time they offered 3 months, then they cried for people to come back, then fired them (and more) again with 1 or 3 weeks severance
Yeah, I was also thought that Stripe may have called themselves 'Strippers' after 14% were 'stripped' of their employment. From the top comment if I was to replace it: [0]
* Severance pay. We will pay 14 weeks of severance for all departing 'Strippers', and more for those with longer tenure. That is, those departing will be paid until at least February 21st 2023.
* Bonus. We will pay our 2022 annual bonus for all departing 'Strippers', regardless of their departure date. (It will be prorated for people hired in 2022.)
* PTO. We’ll pay for all unused PTO time (including in regions where that’s not legally required).
* Healthcare. We’ll pay the cash equivalent of 6 months of existing healthcare premiums or healthcare continuation.
* RSU vesting. We’ll accelerate everyone who has already reached their one-year vesting cliff to the February 2023 vesting date (or longer, depending on departure date). For those who haven’t reached their vesting cliffs, we'll waive the cliff.
It works interchangeably for both 'Krackheads' and 'Strippers'. Oh dear.
Any news on what the other side of the deal is? When I was laid of from Twitter in 2017, all of the benefits were contingent on signing a long document that included a non-disparagement clause.
Don't they realize they are supposed to create a KRY currency and pump it up to supply value to their company and pay their employees? Perhaps if the CEO had gone to Stanford, he would have been better educated in effective altruism and have placed their needs higher.
Why would one conman’s association with an ideology condemn the entire ideology? Because he said he was using it as a ruse? Why are you still selectively believing the conman?
Because his actions were consistent with the ideology, at least as some viewed it.
The FTX failure was because they were extending leverage to customers to purchase and short extremely volitile cryptocurrencies, including obscure/illiquid/likely-worthless ones (which they marketed heavily). The fact that they also diverted or personally pocketed some hundreds of millions on the back of stimulant-mania induced exuberance at the value of the magic-bean collateral they were holding didn't help things, but it wasn't the proximal cause. If pilfering the company were the issue it looks like from the magnitudes disclosed so far they could have just operated out of it.
The reason it's easy to link to EA forum posts telling people to NOT scam for the "greater good" is because it's responding a common view: it's a natural conclusion of navel gazing utilitarian-consequentialist thinking, especially if amplified by viewing all ethical questions through the lens of extinction risk. Doubly so in the face of "rationalist" ideology which is prone to reject received conventional wisdom in favor of bespoke and often self-serving rationalizations. Ordinary non-utilitarian-consequentialist charity communities don't need regular reminders to not scam people.
"Is it infinitely good to do double-or-nothing coin flips forever? Well, sort of, because your upside is unbounded and your downside is bounded at your entire net worth. But most people don’t do this, because their utility is more like a function of their log wealth or something and they really don’t want to lose all of their money. (Of course those people are lame and not EAs; this blog endorses double-or-nothing coin flips and high leverage.)" -- Caroline Ellison CEO of Alameda Research, responding to Scott Alexander of SSC in Feb 2021
"take advantage of strategies other people are biased against using" -- Peter Singer, "The Most Good You Can Do"
Caroline quote is hysterical — that is both a mathematically and philosophically flawed argument. Befitting of someone who would blow out an $8B+ hole in another companies budget by… making leveraged double or nothing coin flip bets.
The source is down on the Singer quote (actually he’s quoting Wilbin) but the context of it is a discussion of how donated dollars travel further in poorer nations. I can’t find any related text around the quote that suggests any nefarious insinuation.
Absent the last several months was there really a lot of people confused on EA forums about the moral weight of intentional fraud? These are pretty elementary issues in non-insane branches of utilitarian moral philosophy…
Practically nobody in the mainstream had ever really heard of the ideology before said conman adopted it and tried to make it popular. Who are the most influential backers of it right now? Convince me it's worth doing some searching on and I will, but if you tell anyone outside of small circles that you are affiliated with the movement, you are going to be on the defensive side for the foreseeable future.
(disclaimer: no idea what effective altruism is about)
You seem to believe that "truly good" causes have a requirement to have "influential backers" behind them in order for you to consider doing them. That seems like a pretty silly way to decide what things are good/bad to do -- People did the same thing with FTX when Matt Damon's commercial aired, and look how that ended up for them. Maybe just research concepts for yourself and decide what's a good idea rather than waiting for a celebrity or rich person to tell you it's worth doing. Chances are, things celebrities tell you to do are the things LEAST worth doing.
It's not that "truly good" causes need an "influential backer," it's that I don't want to have to get into an argument with someone in real life who decides I am some kind of scammer due to being affiliated with a movement that has been getting nothing but bad press thanks to one individual. Time is precious, just like I can't spend time researching every single tool that gets posted on HN for production viability, I can't spend time researching every relatively obscure social movement out there to adopt for myself. I ignored the crypto craze due to listening to the right people, just like I can ignore EA by listening to the same ones.
Me. The movement and ideas are good even if the most famous person connected to it is bad.
You don't hear about the vast majority of EAs who just quietly try and improve girl's education in Indian or distribute malaria nets (to mention two I know personally).
I feel like HN should just auto add a comment that says "Why does <company X> need <n> employees?" with a follow up comment that explains how large corporations work. It literally comes up in every single layoff announcement or other discussion of company size in some way, and the follow on comments are essentially the same every single time.
I'm not saying that a lot of these companies aren't overstaffed (indeed, that's why they are having layoffs!) but these questions always come across as pretty naive in the same way I hear "It's just a website! I could build that in a weekend"-type comments.
I've come to look at it the other way. "Because that's how large companies work" is a lazy non-answer. An honest answer to this question would break it down: # of engineers, # of ops, # of sales, # of hr, etc. And ideally break it down by business division. Of course that requires some real domain knowledge.
I've personally watched morons come in, hire lots of useless employees, and destroy millions of dollars of cash while producing negative effect on the product in a company I cofounded. It happens.
Despite the common refrain, the question is genuinely interesting and it deserves an interesting answer. What's old is the retort "that's just how big companies work". It might entirely be true that 4000 employees is reasonable (or even low!) for an exchange, but I'd really like to hear the arguments.
I think it is more "that's how growing companies work."
Companies don't hire tons more people to maintain their existing products. They hire more people because they want to build more stuff. If you are happy just having the thing you have and keeping it up, sure. But it is clear that the past five years or so has had a big scramble to try to scoop up as much of the crypto pie as possible so you can exit for billions. That means building new features. That means hiring a lot more people. And sometimes all those new people come in, fuck up in their mission to create more value for the company, and leave it worse off.
It is true that existing product offerings for a ton of companies could be maintained effectively by a subset of their workforce. A large portion of the employees are just working on building new shit.
The answer might be interesting, but I don't think the question it is. I almost never see it in a form that indicates a sincere grappling with what it might take to do a given company's job. To me it mainly reads as arrogant dismissal that a company could possibly need that many people. It's along the lines of the general-issue jackassery of "I could build X in 2 weeks", which personally I find tiresome.
The problem is that the numbers depend on a bunch of decisions made under a variety of pressures and constraints to solve a collection of business goals that we (the `people not involved in running the company) may only have a limited view of. There may be situations where it's justifiable to throw people at a problem versus a solution that uses less people. Inertia can keep the results of those decisions around for a long time.
Someone could certainly go through the exercise of deciding how many employees Kraken, Twitter, etc "should" have to perform the functions that someone is aware of, but it's an imprecise straw man at best.
When a company grows at a steady rate staffing can be carefully managed alongside the implementation of new technology to manage said growth.
However, when a company grows rapidly due to high interest in their product, the quickest way to manage that growth is typically going to be manpower.
There are indeed better solutions, but manpower works in a lot of industries, particularly those that grow their volume quickly.
I think the surging popularity of crypto prior to our current downturn sparked some rapid growth and the need for more workers.
On the technical side you really want to build your infrastructure so that it can scale up quickly, but on the customer facing side that's not always possible and thus you might need more personnel to man the chats and phones.
It's sometimes easy to look at a problem from an external view and go wow why do they do it that way, but in my own experience there are unseen internal reasons or obstacles for why a company is not doing it in a seemingly obvious better way.
And for all of those people mentioned, they need custodians to clean up after them, and all of those additional people need their own managers, HR people, etc.
Yes, large corporations tend to get bloated. It doesn't have to be that way though. Many companies will come to find they didn't need nearly as many as they have after all.
I would agree that the more employees a company has, the more the architecture/design shapes around the size of their labor force. But it also doesn't have to be that way
This is hacker news after all, lots of us are hackers that prefer non-VC boosted (nor "cryptocurrency boosted") businesses that are run a bit more lean. Although, it used to be called "Startup News" but lets just ignore that fact for a bit so we can scream at bloated companies for a bit longer.
Seriously. Everyone here seems to think every business should be a permanent bootstrapped, profitable company. If you play the venture game, which Kraken is, you need to grow fast. Typically, though not always, that means hiring people to support that growth.
With 3,700 employees, that's a revenue-per-employee of $270k.
If you are a startup, that is ok, maybe even great!
If you are not a startup, and are in tech/finance that is NOT OK.
Kraken is not a startup.
Of course, my context is the tech sector and not the scammy free-for-all that is crypto, so I may be off-base.
Their RPE is more like a struggling, dingily-lit, zombie chain of brick-and-mortar retail stores than it is a tech firm.
I know HN doesn't like metrics like RPE, but they're never wrong.
edit: just looked it up. For comparison, Binance has around 6,000 employees and around $20 billion in annual revenue which is off the charts in terms of RPE, even for oil and gas. That's a sign they need to hire more.
I don't know if you are genuinely curious but this question is getting kind of old. Every time a company does layoffs, somebody asks, "why does an X company need X number of people?". Every opening has a purpose. No company hires people for fun, and unless you are a company employee you don't know all the different areas, projects, and support staff a company needs to run when they are actually a business trying to make money.
It is a genuinely curious question. I haven't seen the abundance of "Why do they have so many employees" question as I'm new here, and that just seemed like a lot of employees to have if they can just lay off 1/3rd of their workforce overnight.
I would assume most of the 1.1k people is support. You have timezones, hundreds of thousands of customers (if not millions). Kraken has one of the best support I encountered. But with less people buying/selling (as with Amazon: Less buying stuff, less using etc), companies are laying off Marketing, Customer Support, maybe Recruiters and HR. Maybe stopped side projects. I would not expect they shrink their engineering by much.
Is it naive of me to think that CEOs aren't really much better macro predictors than most of us and are kind of doing this in a wave like fad "because that's what everyone else is doing"?
One of the really startling things for me the first time we deposited a big VC check was how compelling the experience is. Printing out an ATM receipt with 7 figures on it was very memorable. We had to remind ourselves that however much it felt like success, it didn't mean shit in terms of our real goals.
I think that's much harder for people who are in that situation with less life experience and little or no experience building actual businesses. Coaching at entrepreneur events, I discovered there are a lot of people whose goal is to "be the next Mark Zuckerberg" (or whoever) or who wanted to found a unicorn. Who were thinking about it as a life stage, as in "I'm not sure if I'll found a startup or go to grad school".
And I suspect that's even more true lately with the vast amounts of VC money sloshing around. It must be quite easy to pay more attention to your investors and your YC cohort and the tech press than the grubby realities of commerce.
It makes sense; if your competitors are hiring, you need to hire in order to keep up and so you don't get out-executed. If they're firing, then maybe you don't need to "keep up with the Jones" as much.
I'm so glad I turned down the job offer at Kraken. The reason I turned it down was because I felt that crypto was a bubble waiting to pop (back in March, but that's been my "wrong" opinion for the last 5 years or more.) The tech stack was nice, the pay was excellent, the product I would have been working on is comparable to Bloomberg Terminal, so it was pretty cool too. But I just thought the job might go away in the near future.
In that case, user eloff is using the wrong terminology.
An offer, in the context of a job interview, always refers to a (paper) contract describing the job title, salary, equity, benefits and other clauses, and implies that the company is ready to hire the candidate.
However, if your assumption is correct, that the company approached eloff with an offer without an interview, that actually means an invitation to have an interview with the company, with no guarantees of getting the job, so when eloff says “I'm so glad I turned down the job offer at Kraken”, I read that as “I declined an invitation to interview with Kraken”.
I have heard many people use the word “offer” to describe an invitation to interview for a job, and it irks me every time.
If you have your crypto on Kraken, or ANY exchange for that matter, migrate your funds to cold storage self custody NOW. Figure it out, back up your keys on paper, it's not that hard.
All these layoffs make me a bit nervous to be graduating next week. There are still countless positions posted though so I'm still fairly optimistic about entering the job market.
For a company built on a Ponzi-scheme (crypto) they sure are being good to their employees and that’s laudable.
“Separation pay: We will pay 16 weeks of base pay for all departing Krakenites inclusive of the paid leave period.
Performance bonus: For those eligible, we will pay each departing Krakenite their bonus as determined by their manager.
Benefits: We will offer eligible Krakenites 4 months of healthcare continuation coverage inclusive of the paid leave period.
All Krakenites will continue to have access to counseling services during this period.
Extension of exercise window: We will extend departing Krakenites’ window to exercise their vested stock options.
Immigration support: Kraken will provide dedicated visa and immigration support for those currently on company-sponsored visas.
Outplacement support: We will provide career support for departing Krakenites, including networking opportunities, job search best practices, interview guidance, and more.”
Lol. Tons of crap coins, fake stable coins, grifters launching ICOs, SBF, bridges getting hacked, being able to print a coin and then get randoms to buy it. Coins named after dogs that mean or reference nothing.
Some 20 years? in and what value has the blockchain provided? What is it being used in that has changed the world? Crypto bulls are all the same: Hayek acolytes hell bent on currency that isn’t fiat.
It is a Ponzi-scheme: it only works if you can find another putz to buy a coin.
Also only the early “investors” made any money in crypto. Just like in a Ponzi scheme. ;)
Again back to the original post though good on this “company” for doing right by its employees.
I regret to inform you that none of those things are ponzi schemes. Many of em are certainly fraud, but a ponzi scheme they are not.
Your incorrect definition of ponzi scheme is essentially 'basic market dynamics in an inflationary economy' and would include the vast majority of financial products in the world, including the ones your probably trust.
Stocks only work if you can find another putz to buy it.
People who are early in any stock take money from later investors.
Also, anyone who purchased bitcoin in the first 12 of the 14 years it has existed is in the green. I think "only early investors" is a pretty superlative way of expressing that.
I received a message from a recruiter there last week. I mentioned that I wasn't interested because of the crypto market right now. Her response was basically to say "just found out the position is no longer being filled", which I'm assuming is because of the impending layoffs. Then this week I see they laid off 30% of their staff. It's crazy to think that they hadn't stopped hiring long before they decided to cut 1,000+ jobs.
This wasn't just a cut to sales or support staff. 30% of engineering was layed off. I would say QA/QE was decimated, but I'm not sure if anyone was left.
What's even more flabbergasting is that this only brings them back to the same headcount they had 12 months ago. This is true of almost all the mass layoffs we've seen (twitter excepted). Companies were on a ridiculous binge over the last year. Every time this comes up people explain it as predictions based on the effects of the pandemic, but I don't buy it. This was like a mass delusion.
End of the year is generally when decisions are made regarding the next year, the whole "but it's Christmas and snowy.." is cute but companies only step back from doing it if they perceive the backlash to be too big and the sentiment is not the same all over the World.
Because a lot of society buys into said consumerism and expects bonuses and stability heading into lots of potentially irresponsible gift-buying decisions for their friends and family?
And I'd expect the calculus is "we're planning to offer severance and paying out bonuses, so they have stability in their consumer choices, and we can start the clock earlier on their severance by doing it as soon as possible (including during a holiday when those employees probably weren't going to be very productive anyway)"
Your take is cliché, factually wrong, and makes you look callous all at once, congrats! Any other major religions' holidays you'd like to dismiss while you're at it?
Because the made up consumerism focused holiday is celebrated by most Americans and generally involves buying gifts for loved ones and attempting to relax with family.
Since most people use the money and PTO from their jobs to enable these goals, losing one's job during this time of year adds an extra layer of stress to those who might have hoped to celebrate the culturally dominant evil made up consumerist capitalist holiday with their loved ones.
> Since the start of this year, macroeconomic and geopolitical factors have weighed on financial markets.
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that they blame geopolitical factors affecting what was shilled as a safe heaven from governments and geopolitical games?
Kraken regularly used shell/cover companies to hire employees. They have a pretty complex web of fronts not-called-Kraken. Entire offices are 'employed' by one of these companies.
As one example: in the US, employers with more than 100 employees have to give 60 days notice of layoffs of a certain size. Outsource customer service to small, closely held subcontractors and you can avoid the requirement.
This is an incredible couching of the last 9 months of cryptocurrency market behavior. Does anybody actually operate on their belief that "geopolitical factors," rather than astonishing amounts of fraud, are responsible for the current downturn?