Mark Cuban-backed Indian blockchain firm Polygon cuts 20% of workforce

Mark Cuban-backed crypto firm Polygon on Tuesday said it has laid off 100 employees which is about 20 per cent of its workforce. The company combined multiple business units earlier this year. It is the latest organisation in the crypto industry to announce job cuts.

In a blog, the company said each of the laid-off employees will receive three months of severance pay, regardless of their level or tenure.

A big part of this strategy includes unifying all of our teams under Polygon Labs to drive more growth.

As part of this consolidation process, we’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our team by 20% impacting multiple teams and about 100 positions.

— Sandeep | Polygon 💜 Top 3 by impact (@sandeepnailwal) February 21, 2023

The job cuts come after the company announced restructuring on January 11. Polygon said its corporate restructuring where it unified its multiple arms of businesses under Polygon Studios, including NFT, gaming, and metaverse arm. The company said that under the new structure the name and brand “Polygon Studios” will be discontinued and Polygon Foundation, based in the Cayman Islands, will entirely own the newly created Polygon Labs

Clarifying the company's financial health at a time when the industry is in limbo, Polygon said, "The treasury remains healthy, with a balance of more than $250 million and more than 1.9 billion MATIC, and we have crystallized our strategy for the next several years to help drive mass adoption of web3 by scaling Ethereum."

Polygon was founded in 2017 when it was called Matic before being rebranded. It was founded by four Mumbai-based software engineers: Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic. It makes the digital coin Ethereum more accessible and can be used for developing other decentralised apps (DApps) like decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs).

The company raised a 'sizeable investment' from Mark Cuban in 2021. A year later, the company onboarded YouTube’s head of gaming, Ryan Wyatt, to lead Polygon Studios, who now will be serving as the President of Polygon Labs.

In February 2022, the company raised $450 million from more than 40 venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital India, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Galaxy Interactive, Tiger Global, Republic Capital, and others.