The SEC has indeed created a lot of problems for the cryptocurrency industry. With this in mind, Coinbase crypto exchange chief Brian Armstrong said that the new chairman of the regulator will have to apologise to the American people.

Blockchain developers

Still, the SEC’s actions have brought huge losses to the niche of digital assets and among other things forced many developers to leave the US territory, which somehow affected the local economy.

What is happening to cryptocurrency companies

The situation was commented on the company’s official blog by its founder and CEO Joe Lubin. Here is a rejoinder on the matter.

Numerous cases of bickering with the SEC – including ours – represent meaningful jobs and productive investments lost due to the regulator’s abuse of power and Congress’ failure to fix the problem. Such attacks will ultimately cost many companies millions of dollars.

Consensys CEO Joe Lubin

The decision to downsize affects 163 Consensys employees across all of the company’s departments, with a total of 828 Consensys employees before the mass layoffs. The laid-off employees will receive severance packages and additional income bonuses in the form of securities, plus they will continue to receive health benefits.

On a large scale, the layoffs also mean a change in the company’s long-term strategy. Still, over the years, it has spent significant funds to incubate many projects operating in or related to the Efirium ecosystem.

Now, Consensys management wants to focus “on the most important solutions that make up the core” of Eth. This was also mentioned by Lubin – here’s his rejoinder, which Decrypt cites.

When trying to look into the future, I see that the next generation economy will not be dominated by large monolithic companies. Instead, smaller teams with Web3-based coordination tools will be more effective. To stay competitive in this fast-growing space, we need to reshape ourselves to become more agile, more efficient, and even more productive.

Some analysts had expressed concerns the day before that a recent string of technical advances by Efirium developers could end up driving down the price of ETH in the long run. It’s all about coin inflation: allowing a relatively high level of new coin issuance again could have a negative impact on the value. In addition, this year, Etherium has lagged far behind Bitcoin in terms of returns, which has created an additional pressure factor on Consensys.

For example, the day before, the so-called dominance of ETNs on the scale of the entire cryptocurrency market fell to levels that were recorded in April 2021. Accordingly, the share of cryptocurrency in the coin industry is falling, while investors are paying more and more attention to other promising projects.

The fall of Efirium’s dominance in the scale of the overall cryptocurrency market capitalisation

This sort of thing seems predictable. While popular second-tier chains like Base and new projects continue to be launched based on Etherium, the Eth network itself is still just as slow and sometimes expensive. Therefore, new users are increasingly connecting with modern alternatives like Solana.

😈 MORE INTERESTING STUFF CAN BE FOUND IN OUR YANDEX.ZEN!

Overall, Consensys has been in an ongoing battle with the regulator after it was accused by the Commission in June 2024 of operating as an unregistered broker that “engaged in the offer and sale of securities” through MetaMask. Lawsuits have also been filed against other services that interact with the wallet.

In recent years, many cryptocurrency companies have laid off some of their employees. The reason for the layoffs has been the consistently high spending on litigation and legal costs in general to withstand the constant pressure from the SEC.

According to CoinDesk's sources, Consensys sued the SEC earlier this year for overstepping its authority with allegations of the regulator's attempts to seize control of the Etherium ecosystem. This was part of a general trend in the digital asset industry for large companies to seek regulatory fairness. In particular, Coinbase and Grayscale have previously sued the SEC, while Kraken and Uniswap are set to launch proceedings in the foreseeable future.

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler

Until that happens, other companies within the crypto industry are also laying off employees. This was announced today by representatives of dYdX Trading, the company that operates the popular decentralised exchange dYdX. And as its CEO Antonio Giuliano pointed out, the team may need a new direction altogether. Here’s a rejoinder to that.

The decision to let go of what is happening has brought the realisation that the company we have created is different from what dYdX should become. We are moving forward with clarity and a renewed passion to create truly amazing things.


This situation once again highlights the importance of the elections that will take place in the US next Tuesday 5 November. Obviously, continuing with the regulators' current policy towards crypto will continue to cause problems for the entire economy. And since Republican Donald Trump has promised to immediately fire Gary Gensler as SEC chairman, there's still a chance for a fix.

For more interesting stuff, check out our crypto chat. Be sure to stop by there to follow the current bullrun in the coin industry.

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL TO KEEP UP TO DATE.