Polygon Labs lays off 60 employees, about 19% of its staff, CEO says

Polygon Labs, the team focused on building the layer-2 blockchain Polygon, has laid off 60 employees, or about 19% of its staff, according to a post published Thursday by CEO Marc Boiron.

The Polygon chain is one of the biggest layer-2 blockchains focused on scaling Ethereum. It has assisted over 2.44 billion transactions, deployed over 1.17 million smart contracts and has recorded $12.8 billion in sales volume, according to its website. Polygon Labs is the entity that helps build out the blockchain’s ecosystem.

Boiron said the team’s growth during the last crypto bull market “diluted” the qualities it wanted in its employees.

“To move as ambitiously and nimbly as possible where everyone is able to take ownership of what they’re doing, we must create an efficient surgical team, with significantly less bureaucracy,” he added. “As a smaller team, we can collaborate more, expedite demanding projects and execute at our highest potential.”

In the aftermath of the layoffs, Polygon Labs is giving a 15% increase to its existing employees total compensation and “eliminating traditional geo-pay models.” As for those laid off, they will get two months severance and health benefits through the end of the month, where applicable.

Polygon’s token, MATIC, fell after the news, but has since rebounded around unchanged levels on the day, CoinMarketCap data shows.

Earlier this week, Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block, whose subsidiaries include Square, Cash App and Afterpay, also laid off staff, reportedly around 1,000 people, or 10% of its team.

Last year, Ava Labs, OpenSea, Yuga Labs, Chainalysis were among a handful of crypto firms that had layoffs in the fourth quarter, the data showed. OpenSea was the biggest with 50% of its staff cut in early November.

Across the tech world, for both big and small companies, there’s been major layoffs. In 2024, about 107 tech companies had layoffs, with almost 30,000 people affected, according to Layoffs.fyi data.

This quarter, there have already been more tech employees cut than in the two preceding quarters, and we’re only one month into the four-month period.