Billionaire twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss announced that 10% of jobs at their cryptocurrency exchange and custodian, Gemini Trust, would be eliminated. The memo was posted on the company’s blog. The layoffs were a part of assessing the business amid “turbulent market conditions that are likely to persist for some time,” they said.
The cryptocurrency world has struggled amid falling prices across digital assets, notably the biggest one. From a record high of $68,990.90 reached in November, the price of bitcoin
BTCUSD,
+0.46%
has more than halved to around $30,000, a level the No.1 cryptocurrency has been struggling to hold on to.
Last month’s collapse of TerraUSD stablecoin proved another blow for the industry that has been tracking the fortunes of U.S. stock markets.
Early investors in bitcoin, the Winklevoss brothers are estimated to have lost around $2.2 billion, or 40%, of their fortunes this year, according to a report by Bloomberg last month. Gemini Trust was started in 2014 by the pair, who have a vast portfolio of investments via their family office, which includes crypto trading platform Slingshot and Paddle, an online auction place for fine art.
Cameron Winklevoss and brother Tyler were worth $3.7 billion each as of June 2, according to Forbe’s real-time billionaire index. They are number 728 on a list of 2,578 wealthy individuals. The pair have a range of investments, from crypto startups to trading platforms such as BlockFi, Messari and TaxBit.
“The crypto revolution is well under way and its impact will continue to be profound. But its trajectory has been anything but gradual or predictable. Its path can best be described as punctuated equilibrium — periods of equilibrium or stasis that are punctuated by dramatic moments of hypergrowth, followed by sharp contractions that settle down to a new equilibrium that is higher than the one before,” said the brothers in the memo.
“This is where we are now, in the contraction phase that is settling into a period of stasis — what our industry refers to as ‘crypto winter.’ This has all been further compounded by the current macroeconomic and geopolitical turmoil. We are not alone.”
