Latest in Crypto Hiring: MoonPay Recruits Time President for 2023
Kraken plots laying off more than 1,000 people amid “negative influences on the financial markets”
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MoonPay is set to add Time executive Keith Grossman to lead its enterprise business, as he is set to join the crypto payments infrastructure company on Jan. 2.
Grossman has spent the last three-plus years as president of publishing powerhouse Time. While there, Time teamed up with Galaxy Digital to offer metaverse education, and the publisher’s television and film production division partnered with NFT creators to develop animated franchises.
“In 2020, I noticed a trend too big to ignore: a shift enabling the evolution from online ‘rentership’ to ‘ownership’ that also accommodated a much-needed shift in consumer privacy,” Grossman wrote in a blog post. “At that point, I knew it was only a matter of time before I ultimately needed to move from the comforts of being an ‘observer’ to that of a ‘participant’ in the adoption of web3.”
In addition to working at Time, Grossman has held leadership roles at Bloomberg and tech publisher Wired.
The upcoming addition of Grossman comes after MoonPay in July filled several executive roles, including the addition of Jim Esposito as chief operating officer and Akash Garg as chief technology officer.
MoonPay, which reports having 5 million customers and supports more than 80 assets, raised $555 million last year in a Series A round that gave the company a $3.4 billion valuation.
Blockchain Founders Fund promoted Tobias Bauer as a partner of the Web3 venture capital fund.
Bauer has worked at the fund for the last three years, holding roles including head of partnerships and principal. He formerly was a venture partner at Republic, a financial technology company specializing in investment-related services in the private markets.
Suvrat Joshi joined identity verification provider Veriff as a senior vice president of product.
Joshi was most recently chief product officer at FarEye and previously worked in roles at Dropbox, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.
“Excited to share that I joined Veriff to bring the digital and physical worlds closer through the identity lens,” Joshi said in a LinkedIn post. “It’s early days, and Veriff is at the leading edge of this shift.”
Veriff, which partnered with Blockchain.com in 2018, offers various verification and fraud prevention services for crypto users.
It is unclear how much Joshi will be working on Veriff’s crypto products in the new role. He did not immediately return a request for comment.
Firms hiring and firing
Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell said in a blog post Wednesday that about 30% of the company’s staff would be laid off as a direct result of the ongoing crypto winter.
“This reduction takes our team size back to where it was only 12 months ago,” Powell said, describing the move as necessary because “negative influences on the financial markets have continued and we have exhausted preferable options for bringing costs in line with demand.”
The cuts amount to more than 1,000 people — roughly the same amount Coinbase laid off as part of cutbacks announced in June.
Not all crypto companies are downsizing.
Digital asset market maker Keyrock said Wednesday it is looking to double its headcount — currently more than 100 — in 2023, despite the bear market. The Brussels-based firm is seeking to expand to Switzerland and Singapore early next year.
Keyrock has already doubled the size of its workforce this year, the company said. The latest hiring plans come after it raised $72 million from investors including Ripple, SIX Fintech Ventures and Middlegame Ventures.
Lantern Ventures, a crypto-focused trading firm led by former Alameda Research co-founder Tara Mac Aulay, is hiring an infrastructure lead. Mac Aulay started Alameda Research with Sam Bankman-Fried in 2017 and left the firm the following year.
The infrastructure engineer would be tasked with carving out a new infrastructure team as the company seeks to manage its virtual private network and developer productivity resources.
“We need to secure all these resources against both accidental loss and deliberate compromise, facing the unusually sharp threats and high stakes that are a systemic feature of crypto finance,” the job post states.
Crypto exchange Bitget has reiterated its intention to increase its number of employees to 1,200 by the first quarter of 2023 — about a 50% increase from its current level.
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