The bear market of the cryptocurrency world has been affecting more than just the investors. Platforms and even startups are struggling to keep themselves afloat right now. Falling victim to the harsh circumstances of this downward trend, Status.IM must let go a quarter of the current staff.

Status.IM is an Ethereum browser startup, and the decision to say goodbye to so many staff members – which was about 25 workers – was announced within the company on Monday. The co-founder, Jarrad Hope, commented that the size of the company simply isn’t viable, leading to the layoffs. Unfortunately, as with most of the cryptocurrency community, there was just no way to see the drop of Ethereum’s price by 80% when it happened. Outside the company, the layoffs were not confirmed until Friday by COO Nabil Naghdy.

When Status.IM held their token sale last year, they managed to raise 182,000 ETH. At the time, that was worth about $64 million, but it would only be valued at $15.5 million today. To make matters worse for the company, they had no “solid banking partners” until earlier this year.

The individuals that the company laid off were deemed “non-essential” to the overall goals that the company has, going forward. Hopefully, with this relief, the company will be able to cover their expenses for another six months with the fiat reserves they have. Still, to help with this tight budget, they’ve requested that their employees take a pay cut.

In the event that this isn’t enough, Hope is working out a plan. He said,

“The reality is that we will have to make another assessment end of Q2 which if the market hasn’t picked up, we will be forced to make the organization even leaner, and the remaining fiat and our large ETH holdings will be used to create a runway measured in years.”

Over the next few months, the company is simply aiming to stick with the timeline they determined in their whitepaper to “get the app into a usable state.” Even with the new restrictions and layoffs, there’s an engineering team working incessantly to deliver on those goals.

Along with the fiat holdings, Status.IM is holding onto 190,000 ETH as a resource for their budget, if needed. Though the goal of getting through the next six months will be with a lot of perseverance and attention to the market, and won’t have much room for error, there are no plans to currently host another funding round.

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