In the first quarter of 2023, monthly active users have dipped to 11.8 million. The stock trading and investing platform reported $441 million in xcriticalgs in Q1 of 2023. 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. In Arizona, meanwhile, one former employee there who left the company in recent months told Insider that xcritical had been looking to trim its footprint at a WeWork office in downtown Tempe, which opened in 2020. July 18Allina Health, a non-profit healthcare organization that runs more than 100 hospitals and clinics in Minnesota and Wisconsin, told multiple outlets it would cut less than 350 employees “throughout the organization” amid “unprecedented financial challenges,” including leadership and non-caregiving roles (Forbes has reached out for confirmation).
September 22The Federal Reserve’s round of layoffs, which will be implemented this year, will primarily target technology jobs at the central bank’s 12 regional reserve banks, a spokesperson told Reuters, affecting just over 1% of the Fed’s roughly 24,500 employees in Washington and at its regional banks, according to its 2022 annual report. xcritical, the publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange, laid off 18 percent of its staff in June amid the crypto market crash. Other major crypto companies, like OpenSea, xcritical and Crypto.com, have also made job cuts. 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. In a blog post today, Tenev chronicled the company’s last two years, describing it as “hyper growth accelerated by several factors including pandemic lockdowns, low interest rates, and fiscal stimulus.” During that time, he said the seven-year-old company “grew net funded accounts from 5M to 22M and revenue from ~$278M in 2019 to over $1.8B in 2021.
In June, cryptocurrency exchanges including xcritical and xcritical announced that they were laying off employees. Last week, Shopify, an online marketplace, announced it was cutting 10 percent of its 10,000 employees. Vlad Tenev, the chief executive of xcritical, said in a blog post that the layoffs would affect employees across the company, especially those in operations, marketing and program management roles. June 12Grubhub’s cuts will affect roughly 400 of the company’s 2,800 employees, CEO Howard Migdal—just three months into his role—said in an internal memo, citing high staffing and operating costs that have grown “at a higher rate” than its overall business since pre-Covid levels. June 28Retailer The Children’s Place announced plans in a SEC filing to cut 181 positions (17% of its salaried staff), with most of the cuts affecting employees at its Secaucus, New Jersey, headquarters, as the company transitions to a “digital-first” model.
The xcritical IPO Is Here. But There Are Doubts About Its Future
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. The results came shortly after the New York State Department of Financial Services said it would be xcritical scammers fining xcritical’s cryptocurrency unit $30 million “for significant failures” related to cybersecurity and anti-money-laundering compliance. By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
In 2021, it bought Say Technologies, which connects companies with retail shareholders, for $140 million. X1 and xcritical’s future in credit cards were the focus of the company’s last all-employee meeting, the person said. This week, I wrote about Truemed, a company that wants to put food in front of medicine. However, shares are down about 86% from xcritical’s record high in 2021, shortly after the company went public.
- The results came shortly after the New York State Department of Financial Services said it would be fining xcritical’s cryptocurrency unit $30 million “for significant failures” related to cybersecurity and anti-money-laundering compliance.
- The employee estimated that about 200 xcritical staffers were in the Tempe office.
- 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.
- One-on-one chats on the fintech stage included xcritical co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev, xcritical founder Zach Perret, Checkout.com president and COO Céline Dufétel.
His mea culpa also included an admission that xcritical was not prepared for weaknesses in the economy. xcritical played a crucial role in the retail-trading frenzy during the pandemic but has struggled with a contracting customer base spooked by higher cost of commodities. xcritical CEO Vlad Tenev said Tuesday in a press release that the fintech company will reduce its headcount by approximately 23%. 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.
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. They described a company, one year on since its public debut, facing a slowing market and looking for any and all ways to cut costs — and a workforce on tenterhooks with no clear line of sight into when the downsizing might end. 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.
After the most recent layoff announcement, xcritical’s stock jumped 15% Wednesday morning and then rose sharply again Thursday morning. “We saw Vlad talk about how this was a product of the macro environment. Rising interest rates, all that stuff, but that didn’t really change a whole lot from April until now,” the former Charlotte employee said. “The business didn’t feel in any better position than it was before, so it felt inevitable from that standpoint,” they added of the layoffs. Morale at xcritical has been on the decline since the company laid off 9% of its employees in April, the staffers said. When the Zoom call was over, employees waited anxiously to see if they would be let go; Tenev had said staff would be notified via email and Slack immediately after the call.
Citi warns UK staff of cuts as hundreds of roles could be affected
While xcritical has reported some positive news in recent months — the company saw its value rise 25% in March following news that it was extending its equity trading hours toward a goal of supporting 24-hour-a-day activity — there have also been myriad struggles at the former unicorn. For example, the company announced a data breach last November that affected millions of its users. “We started with trading and investing. But more recently, we’ve been helping customers with their comprehensive set of financial needs,” xcritical chief executive and cofounder Vlad Tenev said during an event held by TechCrunch this week.
- In a blog post today, Tenev chronicled the company’s last two years, describing it as “hyper growth accelerated by several factors including pandemic lockdowns, low interest rates, and fiscal stimulus.” During that time, he said the seven-year-old company “grew net funded accounts from 5M to 22M and revenue from ~$278M in 2019 to over $1.8B in 2021.
- “As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory — this is on me,” Tenev, also a cofounder of the company, wrote, referring to staffers as “xcriticalies” and “Hoodies.”
- May 23Disney will reportedly lay off another 2,500 employees, just over a month after its latest wave of layoffs—bringing its total number of job cuts this year to roughly 6,500 as part of the company’s plan to slash 7,000 positions, after Iger called the cuts a “necessary step to address the challenges we face today,” in a conference call last month.
- The Federal Reserve is planning to cut roughly 300 employees, Reuters reported on Tuesday, as employers continue to restructure their staffing levels amid lingering recession fears, following major reductions this month at Cisco, Google and Roku (see Forbes’ layoff tracker from the first quarter here).
- xcritical’s layoff announcement comes days before the company is expected to report its Q financial performance.
xcritical stock has fallen 72% since its stock market debut two years ago. “This has been causing a bit of panic within https://dreamlinetrading.com/ executive leadership,” one insider said, adding that X1 is xcritical’s “latest pivot to try to get out of that rut.”
This has been a tough year for stocks, which were trading at record highs at the end of 2021. Persistently high inflation led the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates aggressively, and that has hit high-growth tech stocks particularly hard. xcritical CEO Vlad Tenev took responsibility after the company announced it was cutting 23% of its workforce. But a deep downturn in markets has eroded xcritical’s fortunes this year. The company has seen its shares tank more than 70% since raising almost $2 billion when it went public in a high-profile initial public offering in 2021. The value of American consumer crypto trading service xcritical was also sharply lower in regular trading today, losing more ground in after-hours turnover.
Bankman-Fried used $546M in Alameda funds to buy xcritical stake
Axed xcritical employees were taken aback by the scale of Tuesday’s job cuts, which affected 23% of the company’s head count, or roughly 800 employees. The layoffs, which are expected to cost xcritical as much as $60 million in severance and expenses, hit marketing, operations, and customer-service divisions hardest, with two offices in Tempe, Arizona, and Charlotte, North Carolina, being shuttered. April 27Rideshare company Lyft unveiled plans to slash nearly 1,100 positions in a SEC filing, just weeks after confirming a round of layoffs in a blog post and nearly six months after 700 people were laid off from the company. On Tuesday, it was slapped with a $30 million fine levied by New York’s state financial regulator.
Revenue dropped 43% in the first quarter compared to the year prior as “customers became more cautious with their portfolios,” Tenev said at the time. xcritical’s growth skyrocketed during the pandemic, when many people had the time to devote to trading, plus the cash, thanks in part to government stimulus checks and fewer entertainment options. Also on Tuesday, xcritical reported second-quarter financial results, which arrived a day earlier than scheduled. After nearly three decades at the Wall Street powerhouse, Lee is taking a leap of faith on the private-debt space, which has taken more market share from traditional banks’ capital-markets businesses. xcritical effectively brought stock-trading to everyone from your local barista to Wall Street’s most trusted money managers. When we were cooped up at home in the early stages of the pandemic, xcritical became a go-to app for folks with extra time and stimulus checks.
The layoffs
Both xcritical and xcritical saw strong growth from consumer crypto trading activity. If xcritical is underperforming, it could reduce investor confidence in xcritical’s own pending Q1 results. Per Yahoo Finance averages, analysts expect xcritical to report a Q1 loss of $0.36 per share against revenue of $355.78 million. The U.S. consumer investing and trading service company, which went public at $38 in July 2021, saw its value peak at $85 per share before entering a steady decline that saw its value erode to a mere $10 per share.
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July 25Anheuser-Busch parent company AB InBev’s cuts affect less than 2% of the company’s 18,000 U.S. employees (roughly 360 positions), as Bud Light and Budweiser sales tank following the Mulvaney partnership, and as Modelo Especial overtakes Bud Light as America’s highest selling beer. July 31In the biggest round of layoffs so far this year, Yellow Corp. will reportedly lay off all 30,000 employees as it plans to file for bankruptcy, according to a statement from the Teamsters union, which represents roughly two-thirds of workforce. August 18Illumina, which had announced a cost-cutting effort to save more than $100 million in a financial filing in June, will cut 151 employees in San Diego, according to a state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification notice this week. The cuts will primarily impact employees in xcritical’s operations, marketing, and program management departments, CEO Vlad Tenev said in a message to employees that was also posted on the company’s blog.
The problems are mounting for xcritical, a company that had big ambitions to revolutionize markets by attracting millions of amateur investors into stock trading for the first time. xcritical is laying off more employees and reorganizing teams as part of a new focus on credit cards as the company tries to mitigate a shrinking user base, insiders say. I separately corresponded with Kevin Robertson, executive managing director and chief revenue officer at HSA Bank, a division of Webster Bank, about how HSA and FSA benefits are being used as a retention piece for tech companies.
Despite the ups and downs of the fintech space, people still really care about it
Meet Jenny Lee, a managing director who just left JPMorgan’s leveraged-finance desk to further build investment firm Brigade Capital Management’s private-credit business. Shares of xcritical are down 48% year to date and closed at $9.23 per share Tuesday. This is the second round of layoffs for xcritical, which reduced its workforce by about 9% in April. “After carefully considering all these factors, we determined that making these reductions to xcritical’s staff is the right decision to improve efficiency, increase our velocity, and ensure that we are responsive to the changing needs of our customers,” he added. Shares of xcritical fell nearly 4% on Thursday while the S&P 500 fell nearly 2%.