Fires at SwissBorg – Cyrus Fazel: “The crypto industry has been through a rather extreme situation”

SwissBorg announced the departure of 27 people. In which departments and how many of them in Switzerland?

In terms of direct jobs, we are talking about 24 people, of which 20 abroad, only 4 in Switzerland. The job cuts focus on positions where there is not the same need in the bull market or in the bear market, namely events, marketing, business development. When you grow so fast, you sometimes make a few mistakes.

Are technical positions, such as developers, not affected?

No, because the bear market marks the time to focus on development again and prepare for the future. On the contrary, we recruited a blockchain developer who was available after his company went bankrupt. We could not offer him as favorable terms as his previous employer, but we see that a good developer always finds work.

Should we expect more layoffs in SwissBorg?

We hope it stops there, we do everything for it. The industry has already experienced a rather extreme situation, we see this among all our competitors. BlockFi has fired a lot, Voyager is on the verge of bankruptcy, Celsius has been in default for several weeks. Blockchain.com also lost 250 million. There was a careless management with a lot of leverage effects, as we saw in the case of Three Arrows Capital, which we did not. As in most crises, we faced a liquidity problem, many positions had to be liquidated with cascade consequences for interconnected players.

SwissBorg itself raised fears when the synthetic ether STETH, to which you are exposed, lost parity with the ether. Right after Terra’s UST depeg. Where we are?

Today we are back to less than 2% difference. People make assumptions, but the situation had nothing to do with UST depeg. I think we are heading towards stabilization in the market. Two of the biggest players in the industry, Alameda and FTX, led by Sam Bankman-Fried, are increasing large investments to save platforms like BlockFi – 400 million injected – or Voyager. They seem to have decided to stop the bleeding and they have determined the means. A drop of 70% in the market is already a more than significant correction.

The worst is behind …

I do not have a crystal ball, but we see semi-qualified investors go into bitcoin for 20,000, which we can consider an attractive medium-term price. Of course, the stabilization is fragile. The strong correlation between NASDAQ and the crypto market is a dependency factor, we expect the Fed rate to be announced on 28 July.

Does SwissBorg maintain its ambitious roadmap under the current conditions?

Some smaller projects will be put on hold, such as payment projects or the integration of some currencies. But we maintain our focus on the main axes: ETFs, new à la carte return products with more investor control. Also the play-and-earn part, with X Borg, and this educational and playful dimension towards investment. We will continue to build, the bear markets are created for it.