Nebulas, the autonomous metanet project touting itself as the “future of collaboration” has had to perform staff layoffs of over 50% due to major financial issues.
It’s been reported that the company has laid off more than half of its workforce, consolidating its team of 80 people down to 30.
Nebulas was founded by its CEO, Hitters Xu, the Chinese blockchain pioneer who founded BitsClub and Neo (formerly AntShares). The company held an ICO in December 2017 and raised roughly $60 million.
The project made headlines in August after it announced a decision to postpone the distribution of its token, a decision which included holding onto founder tokens for a period of ten years.
Since then, the company has experienced delays, layoffs and the suspension of multiple elements of its roadmap, and now with the layoffs of Nebulas staff, there seem to be more issues ahead.
According to Becky Lu, a spokeswoman for the company, market conditions and the price of Nebulas’ NAS token was partially responsible for the layoffs.
“One of the reasons was the market price kept going down,” said Lu.
The project’s token, NAS, which was created to power a protocol that was built to analyze other blockchains, debuted at $2 but is currently trading at just over 50 cents. The token once had a market cap of $500 million but has since declined from its peak in January 2018. NAS’ current market cap is $25.7 million.
According the Lu, the Nebulas staff layoffs began last summer and mainly affected the Beijing team. She also noted that company was tightening its strategic focus, adding, “Another reason we decided to cut off the unimportant projects like third-party wallets [was that they are] not core to the main tech visions mentioned in the [Nebulas] white paper. So the dev team of that project was first impacted.”
She also addressed the suspended roadmap projects, noting that the company wanted to tighten its strategic focus.
She added, “Another reason we decided to cut off the unimportant projects like third-party wallets [was that they are] not core to the main tech visions mentioned in the [Nebulas] white paper. So the dev team of that project was first impacted.”
Lu did not comment on whether financial management had contributed to the layoffs. However, the fact that company started to aggressively downsize just months after raising $60 million should raises concerns, even in a down market.
Despite the layoffs, Nebulas has continued to make reach significant milestones. The company recently launched its NOVA testnet, which measures data quality of various blockchains.
“Now that the team has accomplished most of the tech development,” said Lu, “the main job for this year is to build up the community government and consensus to achieve full decentralization.”
Lu insists, however, that the company will also have time to make additional progress on its roadmap.
