This top crypto company is returning to work as South Korea coronavirus outbreak slows 🚨 This article is 4 years old...
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This top crypto company is returning to work as South Korea coronavirus outbreak slows
2 min read
Updated: Apr. 25, 2020 at 9:29 am UTC
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
At long last, the coronavirus outbreak is starting to slow. As a result, individuals in some parts of the world have been allowed to go back to work. One crypto company is benefiting from this trend.
ICON heads back to work as coronavirus slows in South Korea
According to Min Kim, the founder of the leading crypto project ICON, all members of his project ‘s team are “back in the office 100% focused on work” in the wake of a multi-week lockdown to stop the spread of COVID-19 in South Korea.
1/ New #Coronavirus cases are in single digits in Korea. Economy has re-opened. Starting this wk, all ICON team members are back in the office 100% focused on work. This is the result from strong leadership atop and highly educated citizens actually working together.
— Min (@minhokim) April 20, 2020
Min attributed his company’s situation, which is rather rare in a world where dozens of millions (maybe even hundreds of millions) are at home unemployed, to South Korea’s great response to the virus:
“New coronavirus cases are in single digits in Korea. Economy has re-opened. This is the result from strong leadership atop and highly educated citizens actually working together.”
Indeed, per data from Worldometers, South Korea has reported a total of nine cases in the past 24 hours, with the curve effectively flat. For some context, Singapore, which has a total of 9,125 cases, saw a 1,111 increase in cases on the same day.
Crypto industry still suffering
Although the situation is getting better for ICON and presumably other crypto startups based in areas with minimal or shrinking COVID-19 outbreaks, other industry firms have been getting railed by the pandemic, namely the economic effects of it.
Just yesterday, it was reported by Decrypt that ConsenSys — the Ethereum-focused development studio founded by Joe Lubin — had laid off approximately 14 percent of its workforce, equivalent to 90 individuals. Lubin cited “extraordinary uncertainty” forcing the company to “conserve resources,” though this was the company’s second 14 percent layoff in two months.
This is the latest in a series of layoffs in the crypto space.
Also, per previous reports from CryptoSlate, Bitcoin.com, crypto mining firm Bitfarms, mining hardware manufacturer Bitfury, Chainalysis, Elliptic, CipherTrace, and BLOCKTV are amongst the other firms in the cryptocurrency space to have laid off some of their staff in response to the economic effects of the pandemic.
Furthermore, EOS creator Block.one, Ripple, and Blockworks Group, a crypto media and events company, have all implemented a hiring freeze.
Responding to this wave of layoffs, Linda Xie — co-founder of Scalar Capital and one of Coinbase’s earlier employees — has created a spreadsheet for crypto workers laid off in hopes they can find a new home.
Put together a spreadsheet where crypto people that were laid off or just in between jobs can add to it (inspired by ex-Opendoor doc). Hopefully this will be a resource for crypto teams hiring. Please don't spam it so I don't have to lock down the doc ? https://t.co/P48Ekxm7c4
— Linda Xie (@ljxie) April 20, 2020
After all, Bitcoin and the rest of the industry stands to benefit from this crisis, as crazy as that may seem now.
As reported by CryptoSlate previously, Placeholder Capital’s Chris Burniske believes that the crisis “will pass, and crypto’s fundamentals will have strengthened through it” as “new technologies rise as old systems break, and often it takes a crisis to reveal the flaws of the old system in full.”
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Founded in August 2017, ICON has spent many years fostering its L1 ecosystem and pushing for sustainable cross-chain development infrastructure.
Chris Burniske is a partner at Placeholder, a New York venture firm that specializes in cryptoassets.
