NEAR Foundation Announced a 40% Reduction in Staff

NEAR Foundation announced a 40% reduction in staff

On January 11, 2024, NEAR Foundation, the organization behind the NEAR Protocol blockchain, announced plans to cut 40% of staff, equivalent to 35 employees in marketing, business and community development. The NEAR protocol technical team is not affected and continues to operate normally.

The above statement has undergone a meticulous review process from the NEAR Foundation Council (NFC), due to receiving many feedback about delays and inefficiencies in the operations of the NEAR Foundation. Therefore, NFC has decided to reduce NEAR Foundation’s core staff so that it can focus most effectively on its work.

https://near.org/

NEAR Foundation asserts that this decision is only aimed at optimizing productivity in the operating model, while their financial funds remain stable and well-managed,
to continue supporting the development of the entire ecosystem. With over 285 million USD in cash, 305 million NEAR tokens (worth over 1 billion USD), along with 70 million USD in investments and loans.

In the announcement, the NEAR Foundation also shared that the NEAR ecosystem made significant progress in 2023, as the NEAR protocol became the destination for 3 of the top 10 Web3 applications. They also reached record numbers of daily users and expanded cooperation with the Ethereum community.

The above results were achieved thanks to quality cooperative relationships, including:

Collaboration with Eigen Labs (the unit behind the development of the EigenLayer Restaking protocol);
Join hands with Polygon Labs to build zkWASM and deploy Data Availability solution;
Cooperating with startup specializing in security infrastructure Nym Technologies before NEARcon;
Announced partnership with cloud data storage company Alibaba Cloud to increase Web3 adoption in the Asia and Middle East region.

Chart of NEAR

NEAR token price after the news did not fluctuate much. At the time of writing, Near’s price is trading around 3.5 – 3.6 USD

1h chart of the NEAR/USDT pair on Binance at 02:10 PM on January 11, 2024