Near Foundation To Reduce Workforce By 40%

Non-profit organization Near Foundation has announced that it will reduce its workforce by approximately 40%.

In a statement published on Thursday, the Near Foundation said it would cut around 35 employees after completing a recent review.

The cuts are set to primarily affect its marketing, business development and community teams, Near Protocol co-founder and Near Foundation CEO Illia Polosukhin said in the statement.

Near’s drastic consolidation comes after a review process in which the foundation concluded that the Foundation has not been as effective as it could be, with individuals working too slowly and trying to do too many things at once, Polosukhin asserted.

“Following this review, we have decided to significantly consolidate the core Foundation team to focus on a narrower and higher-impact set of activities,” he said.

Polosukhin added that the Near Protocol engineering team and Near contributor Pagoda would continue operations as usual, and that Near Foundation would assist laid off workers in finding new job opportunities in the Near ecosystem, the Web3 industry, and elsewhere.

The staff cuts are part of a longer-term decentralization effort, Polosukhin said.

“Over time, Foundation’s footprint will continue to contract as the ecosystem further decentralizes and various nodes drive more activity in the network and across the ecosystem,” he said.

In spite of the cuts, the Near Foundation treasury “remains strong and well-managed,” with Polosukhin noting that the treasury currently holds over $285 million fiat, 305 million NEAR (worth over $1 billion), as well as $70 million of investments and loans.

“The Foundation is well-placed to continue to support the ongoing growth, development, and further decentralization of the NEAR Protocol and ecosystem,” Polosukhin continued.

Cuts Come Despite Strong Performance

The development comes at a surprising time, considering the Near ecosystem’s recent conclusion of a strong year performance-wise. The Near Protocol is currently used by three of the top ten apps in Web3, as well as a record number of daily users, according to the statement.

In a previous post on Dec. 20, Polosukhin noted that the Near Protocol’s daily active users was exceeding one million daily.

“The Near ecosystem has seen substantial growth in usage this year,” Polosukhin said in his December post, stating that the Near ecosystem is currently boasts 7 million monthly active accounts, 35 million total accounts overall, and an average of over 2 million transactions per day.