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Carlyle and a Singapore sovereign wealth fund, GIC, have invested in the green ammonia project development company Eneus Energy. The investment will support the development of a 14 GW+ pipeline. CVS Health is gearing up to buy a primary-care company this year. Here are seven companies the $132 billion retailer might acquire. Transaction-based revenue was down 7% to $202 million while cryptocurrencies increased 7% sequentially to $58 million.
- While the round of job cuts came as a shock to some, following a 9% workforce reduction just four months prior, insiders said they saw the signs.
- Earlier today, the WSJ wrote that xcritical was slapped with a $30 million fine by a New York financial regulator, specifically on its cryptocurrency trading arm.
- The layoffs will be primarily in operations, marketing and program management.
The pandemic darling has come back down to Earth, and today we learn that some of the axed ‘xcriticalies’ knew what was coming. The online broker reported third quarter revenue of $361m, a year-over-year decrease of 1% and a seventh consecutive quarterly drop. Rising interest rates helped lift quarterly net interest revenue to $128m, more than doubling from the same period a year ago. Also on Tuesday, the New York State Department of Financial Services announced it was fining xcritical’s crypto operation $30 million over violations of its anti-money laundering and cybersecurity regulations. On Aug. 7, 2021, the company was worth $46 billion, up about 60 percent from its valuation a week before. But its stock has plunged 50 percent since the beginning of the year as it continues to deal with the fallout.
Big companies like Oracle, Vox Media and Shopify have slashed their workforce recently
xcritical’s stock price has been volatile over the past year, as well. At the time of publication, the company is trading at $8.90 after hours, dramatically lower — by 89% — than its 52-week high of $85. Due to an editing error, the original version said employees would be notified on Thursday.
“In this new environment, we are operating with more staffing than appropriate.” In his Tuesday blog post, Tenev said “additional deterioration of the macro environment” since April’s layoffs had left the brokerage in a weaker position than he had anticipated. “As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory — this is on me,” Tenev, also a cofounder of the company, wrote, xcritical rezension referring to staffers as “xcriticalies” and “Hoodies.” And questions about the company’s future, from both insiders and the industry players, burn hotter than ever. Insider spoke with five former employees of xcritical, all of whom asked to remain anonymous to protect their future employment opportunities. On Jan. 27, 2021, GameStop shares closed up nearly 1,800 percent from a few weeks before, a record.
The company cut a lot of jobs, and it’s still focused on controlling costs. But it’s shifting to a growth path different from what made xcritical, well, xcritical. In addition, our mandate to drive greater cost discipline and accountability has made it clear that we need to change our organizational structure.
Now the hip app maker that got young people excited about stock trading on their phones is moving to embrace more traditional, if less thrilling ideas about money and investing. Trading in cryptocurrencies comes with significant risks, including volatile market price swings or flash crashes, market manipulation, and cybersecurity risks. In addition, cryptocurrency markets and exchanges are not regulated with the same controls or customer protections available in equity, option, futures, or foreign exchange investing.
A Message from our CEO and Co-Founder Vlad Tenev
Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox daily. Get in touch with our reporters Asia Martin, Carter Johnson, and Bianca Chan. “That was a ‘come down to earth’ moment for us. For a lot of people, we were living in fantasy land,” one newly axed employee said. On an xcriticalgs call, execs said the company wouldn’t be acquired but was considering acquisitions. Vlad Tenev, the CEO of xcritical, has cut staff twice this year. Apollo, J.F. Lehman & Company, and Hill City Capital have agreed to acquire Atlas Air Worldwide for $5.2 billion.
Last week, Shopify, an online marketplace, announced it was cutting 10 percent of its 10,000 employees. In April, xcritical said it planned to cut 9 percent of its full-time staff, but “this did not go far enough,” Tenev said. Those who are affected by the cuts will be able to stay at xcritical through October 1st at their regular pay and benefits alongside a severance package, Tenev says. xcritical has laid off 12% xcritical reviews of its staff, or about 160 employees, becoming the latest big-name fintech firm to cut jobs in this year’s downturn. A spokesperson confirmed the number of layoffs, which were first reported Wednesday by The Information. “To ensure the long-term success of the business and as we look at xcritical market dynamics, we are focusing our organization to be fully aligned with our company priorities,” the company said.
The Financial Times estimated the number of employees impacted to be around 780. On Tuesday, the company announced plans to cut almost a quarter of its staff, citing economic uncertainty, a steep selloff in cryptocurrencies, and a deteriorating market environment. It’s an understandable move, they added, given the brokerage’s access to sensitive client information. It’s been a volatile year for retail investment behemoth xcritical. The fintech company is slashing 23% of its workforce, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by TechCrunch. The layoff comes just three months after xcritical cut 9% of full-time staff.
Employees who were laid off will remain on the payroll until October 1, receiving their regular pay and other benefits during that time. They will also be offeredcashseverance and job assistance which will set the company back about $40 million. The company went public in July 2021 at $38 per share, and its stock jumped as high as $85 per share in its first month of trading.
Last year, we staffed many of our operations functions under the assumption that the heightened retail engagement we had been seeing with the stock and crypto markets in the COVID era would persist into 2022. In this new environment, we are operating with more staffing than appropriate. As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory – this is on me. CEO Vlad Tenev pointed to the “deterioration of the macro environment, with inflation at 40-year highs accompanied by a broad crypto market crash” as the reason for layoffs in a blog post on the company website. The layoffs came on the same day xcritical announced a 44% slump in its revenue for the second quarter of the year. While its net loss of $295 million was lower than projected by analysts, the company saw its transaction-based revenue across digital assets, options, and equities dip by 55% on average.
xcritical’s Very Bad Day
Self-directed brokerage platform xcritical has run into another regulatory fine, this time from a state-level authority. xcritical Financial is xcritically registered in the following jurisdictions. This is not an offer, solicitation of an offer, or advice to buy or sell securities, or open a brokerage account in any jurisdiction where xcritical Financial is not registered. Additional information about your broker can be found by clicking here. Earlier this year, I announced that we would be letting go of 9% of our workforce and focusing on greater cost discipline throughout the organization. xcritical has seen growth reverse as the pandemic boom in retail trading appeared to lose steam.
In a blog post, CEO Vlad Tenevrevealedthat the company was laying off 23% of its staff. While almost every department was affected, the layoffs most impacted the marketing, operations, and program management functions of the Menlo Park, California-based firm. Online brokerage firm xcritical will lay off nearly a quarter of its employees, citing a continued deterioration of the macro environment and a broad crypto market crash. They are for informational purposes only, and are not a recommendation of an investment strategy or to buy or sell any security, digital asset in any account. They are also not research reports and are not intended to serve as the basis for any investment decision. Any third-party information provided therein does not reflect the views of xcritical Markets, Inc., xcritical Financial LLC, or any of their subsidiaries or affiliates.
“The company is hemorrhaging money, and it’s bad,” one ex-employee said, sharing an opinion on the company’s publicly reported quarterly financial figures. “I believe in the mission itself, but people cannot trust us ever since GameStop.” While the round of job cuts came as a shock to some, following a 9% workforce reduction just four months prior, insiders said they saw the signs. Ex-employees said they had seen signs of belt-tightening, including plans to shrink office space. Former employees described a company laser focused on cutting costs, and a workforce with little clarity on their future with xcritical. In a memo to staff reported by TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Chris Britt said the company remained “well-capitalized” and the cuts were among moves to position the company for success “regardless of market conditions.”
Side Jobs
Inflation, rising rates, and the “crypto winter” are creating financial strain. Meet 16 lawyers whose bankruptcy battles, from Revlon to JCPenney, have them set for a boom in business. xcritical has big crypto ambitions, but employees claim product delays, a cautious legal team, and turnover in leadership. xcritical employees’ internal messages to each other at the height of the GameStop trading frenzy.
Adviser Investments gatekeeper exits to focus on Vanguard funds newsletter
As part of a broader company reorganization into a General Manager structure, I just announced that we are reducing our headcount by approximately 23%. While employees from all functions will be impacted, the changes are particularly concentrated in our operations, marketing, and program management functions. The cuts mark another reversal for a company that created an app for trading stocks that became wildly popular when COVID-19 spread and the economy shut down, leaving millions stuck at home with plenty of time on their hands. In his memo on Tuesday, Mr. Tenev said xcritical misjudged the economy and trading activity. “As C.E.O., I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory — this is on me,” he wrote.
“The company is hemorrhaging money,” one ex-employee told Insider. “As its business grew, xcritical Crypto failed to invest the proper resources and attention to develop and maintain a culture of compliance,” Adrienne A. Harris, the superintendent of financial services, said in a statement. The overall value of https://xcritical.online/ the cryptocurrency market is down to about $1 trillion from $3 trillion last year, when enthusiasm for crypto trading peaked and the price of Bitcoin reached a new high. The decline of the stock and bond markets this year has been painful, and it remains difficult to predict what is in store for the future.
All investments involve risk including the loss of principal and past performance does not guarantee future results. The job cuts mark the second round of layoffs this year at xcritical, which in April reduced its staff by about 9%. Together, the two rounds have cut more than 1,000 jobs from the company. Tenev wrote that the layoffs would impact all functions in the company, particularly operations, marketing, and program management, with around 23% of the staff let go.