A gaming NFT studio, Immutable, will undertake a second round of staffing optimization—affecting 11% of its employees. The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
The publication cited an internal memo from chief executive James Ferguson. He said the decision was driven by the need to maximise cash reserves and to direct resources to the most important projects.
“This is hard news, and I apologise to all [employees] affected by these changes. As chief executive I recognise that the cuts will affect the lives of many people, and I take full responsibility for these actions,” the statement said.
According to reports, the optimisation process also includes outsourcing development of ‘traditional aspects of games’ to partners. This will allow the company to focus on ‘Web3‘ components, reorganising some divisions.
Earlier in July 2022, reports of layoffs at Immutable emerged. It was reported that more than 20 employees would lose their jobs (about 8% of the workforce).
The project is known for blockchain games Gods Unchained and Guild of Guardians, as well as its own Ethereum Layer 2 protocol Immutable X.
In September 2021, Immutable raised $12.5 million through the IMX token sale on the CoinList platform. The sale completed in under an hour.
In the same month the company closed a Series B financing round of $60 million. It was led by Bitkraft Ventures and King River Capital.
In March 2022, Immutable raised $200 million following a Series C funding round at a valuation of $2.5 billion.
In June, the company announced the launch of an ecosystem fund of $500 million to finance developers of Web3 games and NFT-focused startups built on Immutable X. Earlier, the same structure with a budget of $40 million was created by the firm in partnership with the gaming portal Kongregate.
As reported earlier, since the start of 2023, Coinbase, ConsenSys, Gemini, Luno, Matrixport, Chainalysis, Blockchain.com, Genesis Trading and Bittrex have announced optimisations.
Protocol Labs, the company behind the development of the decentralized Filecoin platform, announced layoffs of 89 employees (about 21% of the workforce).
The blockchain platform Polygon decided to lay off around 100 employees.