Web3’s Next Winners Will Be Built by Leaner, Denser Teams
Somewhere between 2021 and 2023, a significant portion of the Web3 industry learned, at a considerable cost, that the same logic driving a bull market hiring surge can work just as efficiently in reverse. During the peak of these years, the sector added staff at a pace that made traditional tech look conservative, but when token prices fell, revenue projections were revised sharply downward, and corrections arrived fast. Over 26,000 crypto employees lost their jobs in 2022 alone, with Coinbase and Kraken eliminating 20% and 30% of their workforces, respectively. In fact, by some estimates, the crypto sector as a whole shed roughly 40 percent of its total workforce between 2022 and 2024, leading many to believe that the organizational model being used by the industry was not sustainable. That said, the firms that avoided the worst of that cycle tended to share a common characteristic, i.e., they had not hired for scale. Infrastructure-focused companies that kept building through the contraction, especially those working on Layer 2 performance, cryptographic tooling, enterprise compliance systems, and cross-chain interoperability, were often the ones that emerged stronger. Startale, the company behind the Ethereum Layer 2 network Soneium, reflects this shift clearly, having continued to expand its