Compass Mining retrenches 15% of staff, execs to take major pay-cuts

Ongoing strife in the cryptocurrency space has forced Compass Mining to lay off 15% of its employees while top executives and staff take major pay-cuts.

The firm announced its decision to downscale its workforce in a bid to weather difficult market conditions, just a week after the resignation of Chief Executive Officer Whit Gibbs and Chief Finance Officer Jodie Fisher.

Chief Technology Officer Paul Gosker and Chief Mining Officer Thomas Heller have taken over the reins at the firm as interim co-presidents and CEOs. The duo penned a letter to staff, investors and the wider community outlining the company’s road ahead.

While 15% of the company’s workforce faces difficult layoffs, the acting CEOs also announced that senior employees and its executive team will take significant pay cuts of up to 50%. The Compass Mining website currently displays its workforce - with 78 individuals making up the current team.

Cointelegraph has reached out to the company to ascertain the exact number of staff that will leave the business.

Compass Mining began operations in January 2021 as a mining hosting service and to date has sold over half a billion dollars of mining equipment and currently operates more than 30,000 mining machines for its customers.

Gosker and Heller’s message highlighted a fateful pitfall of the business’s initial success, as its efforts to upscale to meet increasing demand led to the company growing too quickly:

“When we launched, we were amazed by the level of demand for our services, and as a result, we tried to address the operational, financial and technology bottlenecks faced by all growing companies by hiring more people.”

Compass is the first mining firm to announce job cuts amid the ongoing downturn across cryptocurrency markets, but it is not the only casualty in the ecosystem.

Related: Another miner cashes in: Argo Blockchain reports selling 637 BTC to pay debts

As previously reported, a host of high-profile firms are at opposite ends of the spectrum. The likes of major exchanges Binance, Ripple and Kraken are looking to bolster their workforces, while Gemini, Coinbase and Crypto.com have begun reducing their staff numbers.

A number of major mining companies have also been forced to sell off portions of their Bitcoin (BTC) holdings in response to cryptocurrency market sell-offs since June.