ConsenSys CEO Joseph Lubin acknowledged that the company would lay off 96 employees in order to focus its resources on its core operations.
ConsenSys, MetaMask’s parent firm, is laying off 11% of its workers, blaming “uncertain market conditions” created on by recent failures.
ConsenSys CEO Joseph Lubin wrote in a blog post on Jan. 18 that “poorly behaved” centralised financial entities have cast a “broad cloud on our ecosystem that we will all need to work through.”
Lubin stated that the decision will affect 96 people and is part of the company’s goal to focus resources on its core businesses.
Lex Sokolin, ConsenSys’ chief cryptoeconomics officer, told Cointelegraph a few days before the layoffs were formally announced — but after they had been widely reported — that the industry was still far from broad acceptance globally.
“We’re still in the early stages of this technology. “The general people does not really get it,” he stated.
According to ConsenSys, over 30 million users used MetaMask per month during the previous bull run to access DeFi protocols, manufacture and trade nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and participate in decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). While encouraging, it is only a drop in the ocean on a worldwide scale.
“MetaMask has 30 million monthly users, and there are probably 500 million addresses in Web3,” Sokolin added. “However, that is not five billion people.”
Whether asked when crypto will become popular, Sokolin stated it all depends on having enough compelling use cases for it, as well as a strong ecosystem to support it.
He also dismissed the notion that it will arise from improved user experience and clearer regulations.
“They’re not the things that people say, like ‘when will UI be better?’ or ‘when will regulation make it better?’ These are essential, but they are not the catalyst,” Sokolin added.
“The catalyst of things is, one: Is there going to be enough stuff to buy on Web3 that I want to own?”
“If I live in Web3 and my avatar, social media, data, my position as a person, prestige, community belonging […] are all related to me owning digital items, you’ll ultimately come to a point where everyone wants to undertake commercial transactions in Web3.”
“So for me, economic adoption is the most important thing. Because it’s going to pull the rest of it into the ecosystem.”
Lubin stated in his most recent article that the company will focus on streamlining its personnel and focusing on core value drivers such as end-user custody solution MetaMask, developer platform Infura, and “new services” that expand Web3 commerce and DAO communities.
