Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, spoke Wednesday about Binance's plans to hire heavily in 2023. He expressed a somewhat contrarian view amid ongoing pressure on coin prices that has forced crypto firms to lay off large numbers of staff.
A few years ago, Binance had 3,000 employees. In 2022, it had "almost" 8,000.
Zhao stated at the Crypto Finance Conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland, that Binance plans to increase staff by 15% to 30% by 2023.
In 2022, nearly $1.4 trillion was wiped off the value of cryptocurrency including bitcoin and ether. Since then, rival exchanges have cut large parts of their workforces.
Huobi and Coinbase cut 20% of their workforces, while Kraken laid off 30% of its employees in November. Coinbase has cut jobs twice in the past year.
Zhao acknowledged that Binance is not "super efficient" and that the company needs to get "well-organized" before the next crypto bull run.
“We will continue to build and hopefully we will ramp up again before the next bull market,” Zhao said.
Crypto industry failures in the last year include the collapse of major projects, liquidity issues, bankruptcies, and the high-profile failure of the crypto exchange FTX. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, faces eight criminal counts, including fraud. He has pleaded not guilty.
As a result of Binance's involvement, FTX collapsed. Binance offered to purchase FTX's non-U.S. businesses with liquidity issues but later pulled out. FTX's downward spiral was further intensified when Zhao publicly announced that his company was selling its holdings in FTT, FTX's native token.
Zhao has said he “did not master plan” the collapse of FTX.
At the CFC St. Moritz conference, Binance CEO stated that the collapse of FTX "did not significantly damage" the crypto industry. In his opinion, FTX "is not a big player, but they make a lot of noise.""There is definitely damage, but the industry will be fine," Zhao stated.
