The co-founder and CEO of Metaplex, Stephen Hess, stated on Thursday that the company has started a wave of corporate layoffs.
He said in his tweets that the company had to make the painful decision to lay off several members of the Metaplex Studios team.
(2/7) Since Metaplex is the base layer of the Solana NFT ecosystem, it’s our core responsibility to ensure the long term sustainability of the protocol for the benefit of the community.
— stephen.sol (@meta_hess) November 17, 2022
As the foundation of the Solana NFT ecosystem, Stephen contends that Metaplex has a primary obligation to secure the protocol’s long-term viability for the good of the community.
Metaplex’s Treasury Wasn’t Directly Affected
He continued to claim that although the FTX bankruptcy did not have a direct impact on the company’s financial situation; it had a significant indirect effect on the market and caused them to reevaluate taking a more cautious strategy going forward.
The CEO of Metaplex has stated that forging ahead, the company would refocus its efforts on a few crucial projects, including Royalty Enforcement, Creator Studio, Fusion, Compression, and continuous development of dev tools and SDKs.
Launched in 2021, the Metaplex protocol underpins Solana’s non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The platform claims to have fueled one of the fastest-growing industries in history, with over $3 billion in trade and $1 billion in revenue earned directly from creators.
The company launched a native governance token, MPLX, amidst the bearish trend, serving as the utility token for the Metaplex Protocol.
With an $889,443 24-hour trading volume on Coinmarketcap, the cryptocurrency is presently trading at roughly $0.056, down from its all-time high of nearly $0.89. Over the past 24 hours, the MPLX token has decreased by 1.57%.
As previously reported by The Crypto Post, the Solana Foundation had around $1 million on FTX.com as of November 6, when FTX ceased withdrawals. This has a minor impact on the Solana Foundation as it accounts for less than 1% of its cash and financial equivalents.
They also pointed out that the fund does not deposit SOL on FTX.com and that most of the top Defi projects on Solana have little to no exposure to FTX.
