Marketing and product teams hit hardest as blockchain analytics firm Nansen lays off 30% of workforce

Nansen’s marketing and product teams bore the brunt of layoffs totaling 30% of the company’s workforce, which the blockchain analytics firm blamed on “brutal” conditions in the cryptocurrency market and expansion outside of its core business.

“This will allow us to focus on our core products of data, analytics and research,” the company said in an email Forbes. It plans to focus on an updated Nansen information dashboard (Nansen V2), and Nansen Query, a software that gives customers access to curated and individualized blockchain reports.

While almost all teams have been affected by the layoffs, marketing and product divisions have been hit the hardest, according to the statement. Nansen did not disclose how many employees were affected or the total number of employees, but data from LinkedIn indicates it had about 200 employees.

Nansen follows blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, which cut about 5% of its staff, and crypto-intelligence firm Messari, which cut 15%, both in February.

All the companies cited tough conditions in the cryptocurrency market, whose value has fallen 14% to $1.18 trillion over the past 12 months, according to data from CoinGecko. However, prices are up 30% this year as digital assets recover from the depths of the 2022 slump.

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Separately, leading crypto exchange Binance told Forbes that it reassessed its staffing “to focus talent density across the organization to ensure we remain nimble and dynamic.” Ismael Garcia Makroum Talbi, a Binance spokesperson, responded via email to a Forbes request for comment on a Twitter post by journalist Colin Wu who said the company was going to lay off 20% of its workforce.

“This is not a case of entitlement sizing,” Talbi wrote, “but rather reassessing whether we have the right talent and expertise in critical roles, and so we will continue to seek to fill hundreds of open roles.

In the announcement of Nansen layoffs at Twitterwrote CEO Alex Svanevik, “While we’ve seen diversification of revenue via corporate and institutional customers over the past year, our cost base is too high for where the company is today.”

He took responsibility for expanding too far. “We wanted to invest and build in a tough market where others needed to step down,” which led to “taking on surface that is not part of Nansen’s core strategy.” But he added that the company has enough funds for “several years” of operation.

Nansen last raised $75 million in a Series B funding round in December 2021 that valued the company at $750 million, according to data from PitchBook.