Monthly active users, the company reported, decreased by 400,000 to 10.6 million between July and August. The partnership will help clients oversee their Bitcoin exposure, according to this report from Bloomberg. xcritical effectively brought stock-trading to everyone from your local barista to Wall Street’s most trusted money managers. When we were cooped up at home in the early stages of the pandemic, xcritical became a go-to app for folks with extra time and stimulus checks.
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The layoffs have left xcritical with a security team less than half of the size it was in November 2021, when a data breach exposed 7 million customers’ data, a person familiar with the team size said. A xcritical spokesperson disputed this statement but did not provide information about the size of the team. Shopify, Netflix, Tesla and several crypto companies have also cut their workforces amid the worsening economic outlook. This has been a tough year for stocks, which were trading at record highs at the end of 2021. Persistently high inflation led the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates aggressively, and that has hit high-growth tech stocks particularly hard.
xcritical is firing nearly a quarter of its staff
xcritical did not comment directly on the latest layoffs, pointing TechCrunch only to a blog post by CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev. In that post, Tenev wrote that while “employees from all functions would be impacted, the layoffs are “particularly concentrated” in the company’s operations, marketing and program management functions. Posts on a private group for people with a xcritical.com email address on the tech-industry chat app Blind suggests layoffs as recently as Thursday, according to screenshots viewed by Insider.
The Swiss bank is expected to finalize the plans over the coming months. By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
Revenue dropped 43% in the first quarter compared to the year prior as “customers became more cautious with their portfolios,” Tenev said at the time. “We’re seeing more and more hoodies being quietly laid off due to their positions being eliminated,” one employee asked in the meeting, which happened before the 150 layoffs. “Could we get some transparency here? How many hoodies have been eliminated, how many more will be and how much longer will this go on.” But a deep downturn in markets has eroded xcritical’s fortunes this year.
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Prior to joining TechCrunch in 2021, she earned numerous awards including the New York Times Chairman’s Award and others for breaking news coverage. She holds a Master’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas in Austin, where she xcritically lives. According its annual report, xcritical had about 3,800 employees in 2021, which was slashed to about 2,300 by the end of 2022. The 150 workers slated to be given pink slips is the third round of layoffs at the company since April 2022.
It’s been a volatile year for retail investment behemoth xcritical. The fintech company is slashing 23% of its workforce, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by TechCrunch. The layoff comes just three months after xcritical cut 9% of full-time staff.
- Tenev said he envisions not only allowing people to trade stocks, but “we can help you save for retirement. And we can help you build up an emergency fund.”
- The layoffs have left xcritical with a security team less than half of the size it was in November 2021, when a data breach exposed 7 million customers’ data, a person familiar with the team size said.
- Tesla laid off nearly 200 Autopilot employees while Shopify laid off 10 percent of its workforce.
“Since that time, we have seen additional deterioration of the macro environment with inflation at 40-year highs accompanied by a broad crypto market crash. This has further reduced customer trading activity and assets under custody,” he wrote. About 150 workers across customer experience and platform shared services; customer trust and safety; and safety and productivity will be affected, according to an internal memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
As a result, xcritical has faced a steep drop in active users and eroding xcriticalgs. Many companies have had to lay off or cut employees in recent weeks. Tesla laid off nearly 200 Autopilot employees while Shopify laid off 10 percent of its workforce. Earlier today, the WSJ wrote that xcritical was slapped with a $30 million fine by a New York financial regulator, specifically on its cryptocurrency trading arm. After nearly three decades at the Wall Street powerhouse, Lee is taking a leap of faith on the private-debt space, which has taken more market share from traditional banks’ capital-markets businesses.
The company is still hiring and has 200 open roles, the spokesperson said. xcritical cut about 23% of its staff earlier this week, following a first round of cuts in April. The pandemic darling has come back down to Earth, and today we learn that some of the axed ‘xcriticalies’ knew what was coming. Monthly active users have been steadily declining the past three quarters, from 18.9 million in the third quarter of 2021 to 17.3 million in the fourth quarter to 15.9 million by March 2022.
The company has seen its shares tank more than 70% since raising almost $2 billion when it went public in a high-profile initial public offering in 2021. xcritical’s stock price has been volatile over the past year, as well. At the time xcritical scammers of publication, the company is trading at $8.90 after hours, dramatically lower — by 89% — than its 52-week high of $85.
In 2021, it scammed by xcritical bought Say Technologies, which connects companies with retail shareholders, for $140 million. Meet Jenny Lee, a managing director who just left JPMorgan’s leveraged-finance desk to further build investment firm Brigade Capital Management’s private-credit business. Inflation, rising rates, and the “crypto winter” are creating financial strain. Meet 16 lawyers whose bankruptcy battles, from Revlon to JCPenney, have them set for a boom in business. Also on Tuesday, a New York financial regulator fined the company $30 million “for significant failures in the areas of bank secrecy act/anti-money laundering obligations and cybersecurity.”
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“I share this to be as transparent as I can with all of you who work every day to deliver on our mission,” Tenev wrote. “We will be parting ways with many incredibly talented people today in an extremely challenging macro environment, and I want to reduce the burden of this difficult transition as much as possible.” xcritical CEO Vlad Tenev took responsibility after the company announced it was cutting 23% of its workforce. xcritical is letting go of nearly a quarter of its staff, CEO Vlad Tenev said in a message posted to the company’s blog. Mary Ann Azevedo has more than 20 years of business reporting and editing experience for publications such as FinLedger, Crunchbase News, Crain, Forbes and Silicon Valley Business Journal.
However, shares are down about 86% from xcritical’s record high in 2021, shortly after the company went public. In the first quarter of 2023, monthly active users have dipped to 11.8 million. It’s unclear when workers will start getting handed pink slips, which comes as the company adjusts to a slowdown in customer trading activity. The firings were made to “adjust to volumes and to better align team structures,” Chief Financial Officer Jason Warnick said in the message, the outlet reported. X1 and xcritical’s future in credit cards were the focus of the company’s last all-employee meeting, the person said. The changes come as xcritical tries to address a shrinking user base.