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The Nebulas blockchain project has been in the works for some time, but they recently gained attention in August as a result of delaying token distribution.
While this action would seem barely bothersome, they announced the intention to possibly hold onto founder tokens for a decade, which should’ve been the first indication that something was amiss.
Now, the reason that Nebulas is holding down a spot in the news is due to their repetitive layoffs, as the company has shelved their roadmap until they can recover enough for the NAS token to be worth something. Becky Lu, speaking for the project on the layoffs, said,
“One of the reasons was the market price kept going down.”
NAS originally was launched into the market at $2 and was intended to be used for powering the Nebulas protocol and measure other blockchains. However, CoinMarketCap shows that the company is now at less than 25% of that value. NAS used to be in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, but it has fallen far from that now.
The layoff, though they seem to be reaching the news websites now, actually started in the summer of 2018. The team that was hit the hardest was located in Beijing, but the company was hoping to tighten the reins on their strategy. Explaining, Lu said,
“Another reason we decided to cut off the unimportant projects like third-party wallets [was that they are] not core to the main tech visions mentioned in the [Nebulas] white paper. So, the dev team of that project was first impacted.”
The overall problems in the cryptocurrency market usually remain independent from other industries.
However, considering the layoffs at ConsenSys, Bitmain, ShapeShift, BlockEx, and now Nebulas during the bear market, it is clear that cryptocurrency’s success and failure has the power to hurt blockchain companies as well. Based on recent reports, Nebulas has already lost 50 of its 80-person staff.
At this point, there is no confirmation of whether treasury management made an impact. However, the coincidence that the layoffs came about seven months after the project held its $60 million token sales is somewhat curious.
Even with these changes and difficulties, Nebulas has been working on making progress via incentive programs to entice both developers and community members. The NOVA Testnet was launched at the end of last year, which examines the quality of other blockchains’ data. CEO Hitters Xu posted a 2018 year in review blog on Medium that describes this launch in greater detail.
At this point, Lu believes that the company is sustainable for at least another two years, which is based on the assumption that they will have the time to reach more of the milestones on the roadmap. Lu concluded,
“Now that the team has accomplished most of the tech development, the main job for this year is to build up the community government and consensus to achieve full decentralization.”
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