by The NEAR Protocol’s creator, Near Foundation, is cutting 40% of its employees despite the apparent growth and development in its ecosystem over the previous year, as stated by CEO Illia Polosukhin on January 11.
Although the NEAR Protocol Engineering team was unharmed, the Foundation’s marketing, commercial development, and community teams lost 35 individuals due to the cut.
A thorough evaluation of their activities led to the decision, which Polosukhin said was made in conjunction with the NEAR Foundation Council (NFC). He said that the foundation’s staff “moved too slowly and were trying to do too many things at once,” which led to inefficient operations.
The core Foundation staff will be drastically reduced in size so that we can concentrate on a smaller number of initiatives with a greater impact. According to Polosukhin, “as the ecosystem decentralizes and different nodes drive more activity in the network and across the ecosystem,” the future of the Foundation’s footprint will shrink.
However, the Foundation still claims to be financially strong, with a treasury of more than $285 million in fiat, so it must be doing something right. Its treasury is made up of $70 million in loans and investments in addition to more than $1 billion worth of NEAR tokens.
Increase in the NEAR ecosystem
This internal development has occurred at the same time as the decentralized financial ecosystem on the NEAR Protocol has shown outstanding success.
According to DefiLlama statistics, the total value of assets locked (TVL) on the Near blockchain reached a 14-month high of $95 million in December after surging beyond $100 million.
This amount, however, pales in comparison to its record high of about $500 million in 2022.
In addition, blockchain-based decentralized exchanges (DEXs) see a lot of traffic on their networks; in the last seven days, around $47 million has passed through their platforms, and in the past 24 hours, over $10 million has passed.
Data from CryptoSlate shows that the NEAR token has also had a significant spike, increasing 17.25% to $3.73 in the last 24 hours. It is not surprising that there has been an increase given the 75% price performance gain over the last 30 days.
