With a current market cap of around $17 billion, it comes as no surprise when the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange sees bigger in-house opportunities as the best play in the current climate. CEO and co-founder of Binance, Chanpeng Zhao, discussed his myriad business considerations in a video aired amid the Consensus 2022 conference, wherein Zhao explained that acquisitions and increased staffing are primary to Binance's next several opportunities in the industry.
Zhao's sentiments go against the grain in terms of other similarly situated firms, represented by Rain Financial and Gemini Trust, which both cut around 10% of their workforce in recent months as the financial climate grows uncertain. Coinbase, too, has cut back on both spending and hiring, the latter of which became a major talking point in early June as the crypto firm tried to keep its layoffs under wraps.
It's not just the crypto industry, either, as job cuts have become the norm for the better part of the entire tech industry, seen within the 9% slashing of Robinhood offices, as well as Netflix's cuts following a loss of over 200,000 subscribers. A purported 4,044 layoffs occurred within the tech industry in May alone, with several of the biggest firms within the field slowing or pausing entirely on hiring. Such places as Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, Facebook, and more are putting the brakes on acquiring new talent.
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For Binance's Zhao, however, it's the perfect occasion for such endeavors. "We have a very healthy war chest, we in fact are expanding hiring right now," Zhao explained. The company has remained financially sensible in the face of contending exploits, witnessed most prominently in extravagant marketing. For its one-minute length 2022 Super Bowl ad, which featured nothing but a QR bouncing between the screen like a DVD player screen saver, Coinbase spent a whopping $14 million.
"During bull markets, everyone's starting their own projects, everyone's paying everyone ridiculous compensation," the Zhao interview continued. Zhao now views the current market as a more stable landscape, wherein specific phenomena can be utilized to improve upon the business at hand. He explains that "if we are in a crypto winter, we will leverage that, we will use that to our max."
Apart from growing its internal staff, Binance also vies to expand through continued mergers and acquisitions (M&A) endeavors, primary among them being the $200 million Coinbase Forbes investment. The strategic endeavor is meant to broaden the avenues by which blockchain technology can be adopted across sectors, putting a major emphasis on budding Web3 potential. Other major Binance acquisitions include CoinMarketCap back in 2020, Trust Wallet, and Jex.
Binance coin itself, which as of writing sits at $217 and ranks as the fifth top global crypto on CoinMarketCap, remains still under investigation via the SEC for potentially being unregistered security. If that wasn't enough, Binance, too, is under the spotlight via both the IRS and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for allegedly being embroiled in both money-laundering and tax-evasion schemes.
