Blockchain startups forced to lay off staff to survive the bear market

The bear market – which many hoped optimistically would only have been a few months – swallowed the whole year, and with it a series of cryptocurrency projects.

The latest victim is ETCDEV, the development team of much of the software adopted by Altere's classic currency.

According to a recent post, the group simply does not have sufficient funds to continue building on the nascent blockchain and has officially closed its doors. This news comes right days after appealing to his community for potential donations.

Unfortunately ETCDEV can not continue working in the current situation and must announce the arrest of our current activities pic.twitter.com/N6xWnpBNJJ

– ETCDEV (@etcdev) 3 December 2018

The ETCDEV team is not alone. It joins a litany of blockchain businesses – including Civil, STEEM and SpankChain – which have all been paralyzed by these years due to the market downturn.

Cryptocurrency businesses forced to resize

Just recently, the "decentralized" content sharing platform STEEM shared a wordy blog post, stating it necessary to make 70% of its workforce redundant.

He blamed the "weakness of the cryptocurrency market, the stock returns from the automatic sale of STEEM in decline and the rising costs of managing the complete Steem nodes" for the sudden wave of layoffs – and not an unsustainable business model.

SpankChain is another company that feels hurt. It is a token-based platform for donation to adult entertainers. A few days after declaring explosively that they paid $ 72,000 to the artists, the company suddenly left eight employees.

A similar story is Civil, a cryptocurrency rollover platform, once anchored to "save journalism" with an ERC-20 token. Newsflash: it turns out that it can not, it's too expensive.

In the months leading up to its most recent public failure, Civil's serious lack of self-awareness has led to the opening of 18 newsrooms around the world, presumably without regard to the cash flow needed to support such a vast network of creators of content.

Well, the initial money supply (ICO) of the project failed. Thus, disgruntled employees claimed that the company did not pay its journalists, accusing staffers of having repeatedly been deceived about the potential value of its token.

According to the Civil website, all its news-desk are still operating, in some way, despite the reimbursement to ICO investors of the small sum of money collected.

Even the biggest names in cryptocurrency are interested

It is not just the new cryptocurrencies that struggle to find their feet in a market that is too saturated. Even some of the game's most powerful businesses are limping.

ConsenSys, an important blockchain entity that massively supplies the software solutions related to Ethereum, has confirmed that it would be "restructured" in such a way as to see an unprofitable cryptocurrency supported by being completely isolated from financing.

Thus, after managing the company with an avant-garde passion for workers' autonomy and the variety of the project, its founder Joseph Lubin was finally forced to admit that the ConsenSys model was unsustainable in its current form.

He added that it was necessary to introduce parameters such as income and return on investment for his business, as if they were revolutionary at all.

In the end, all these events point to one thing: a problem at the sector level with the management of expectations.

Companies seem ill-equipped to navigate the rhetoric and clamor to properly communicate the limits of technology that they sell to the general public and institutional investors.

If 2019 needs to be marked by specific goals, let it be an understanding of market-level sustainability, regardless of the price of Bitcoin.