NEAR Foundation to Reduce Workforce by 40%

The non-profit NEAR Foundation, responsible for the development of the eponymous ecosystem, will lay off approximately 40% of its staff as part of a reorganization.

“Together with the NEAR Foundation board, we conducted a thorough analysis of our activities. During this process, we received feedback that the foundation was not always as effective as it could be, sometimes progressing slowly and attempting to do too many things at once. We decided to consolidate the core team to focus on a narrower set of activities,” explained the company’s CEO, Illia Polosukhin.

According to him, as the ecosystem’s decentralization expands, NEAR Foundation’s presence within it will continue to diminish.

The current reorganization will affect 35 employees, primarily from the marketing, business development, and community departments. The project’s engineering team will continue to operate as usual, Polosukhin emphasized.

He noted that the NEAR Foundation’s treasury remains “strong and well-managed,” with over $285 million in fiat, 305 million NEAR (over $1 billion at the time of writing), and $70 million in investments and loans.

“The foundation is fully equipped to continue supporting the growth, development, and further decentralization of the protocol and ecosystem,” stated Polosukhin.

The price of NEAR has increased by more than 15% in the last 24 hours, with the token trading at around ~$3.8 (CoinGecko). The quotes are nearly 82% below the all-time high of $20.44 recorded in January 2022.

In June 2023, NEAR Foundation partnered with the cloud service of Chinese tech giant Alibaba.