According to reports, US trading platform Robinhood Markets has laid off its employees for the third time as a result of a drop in crypto trading activity and client demand.
The Wall Street Journal published an internal company message that stated Robinhood fired 150 employees or 7% of its full-time workforce. Employees in customer trust and safety, customer experience and platform shared services, & productivity and security were among those laid off in the most recent round.
WSJ reports that in an internal company message, Robinhood’s chief financial officer Jason Warwick stated that the changes were made to “adjust to volumes and to better align team structures.”
Continuously, we are assuring operational excellence in the manner in which we collaborate. This could occasionally involve that teams adjusting based on factors including workload, volume, organizational structure, and more.
Representative for Robinhood.
This is Robinhood’s third wave of employee reductions, following two rounds of layoffs in April and August 2022 that resulted in a net loss of over 1000 employees by the end of the year.
Due to the numerous layoffs, Robinhood is experiencing a fall in client engagement and a drop in the volume of its cryptocurrency trading. Robinhood had approximately 21 million monthly active users in Q2 2021. By May 2023, that number had fallen to just 11 million.
In response to the SEC’s crackdown on centralized exchanges, Robinhood recently announced that it would no longer support Cardano (ADA), Solana (SOL), and Polygon (MATIC) by June 27.
While the company did not provide a detailed justification for its action, the affected tokens were among the cryptocurrencies identified as securities by the SEC in its lawsuits against crypto exchange giants Coinbase and Binance.