Near Foundation cuts staff by 40% despite booming NEAR ecosystem

Near Foundation, the driving force behind the NEAR Protocol, is streamlining its workforce by 40% despite its ecosystem’s noticeable growth and development during the past year, according to a Jan. 11 statement by CEO Illia Polosukhin.

The Foundation revealed that the reduction impacted 35 team members within its marketing, business development, and community teams, leaving the NEAR Protocol Engineering team unaffected.

Polosukhin stated that the decision was reached in collaboration with the NEAR Foundation Council (NFC) and stems from a comprehensive assessment of their operations. According to him, the Foundation’s operations sometimes lacked optimal effectiveness as they “[moved] too slowly and [were] trying to do too many things at once.”

“We have decided to significantly consolidate the core Foundation team to focus on a narrower and higher-impact set of activities. Over time, Foundation’s footprint will continue to contract as the ecosystem further decentralizes and various nodes drive more activity in the network and across the ecosystem,” Polosukhin added.

However, despite these internal changes at the Foundation, the entity stated that it remains robust financially, boasting a treasury exceeding $285 million in fiat. Its treasury also includes 305 million NEAR tokens valued at over $1 billion and $70 million in investments and loans.

NEAR ecosystem grows

Meanwhile, NEAR Protocol’s decentralized finance ecosystem has demonstrated remarkable performance in parallel with these internal developments.

According to DefiLlama data, the total value of assets locked (TVL) on the Near blockchain surged past the $100 million mark in December before retracing to its current value of $95 million, representing a 14-month high.

However, these numbers pale significantly against its all-time high of nearly $500 million in 2022.

Furthermore, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) based on the blockchain enjoy high network activity, facilitating transactions exceeding $10 million within the last 24 hours and around $47 million in the previous seven days.

Simultaneously, the NEAR token has experienced a notable surge, up 17.25% to $3.73 during the past day, according to CryptoSlate’s data. This uptick is consistent with its price performance growth of 75% during the last 30 days.

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