Now, xcritical boasts a workforce of about 1,200, according to its listing on job board Zippia. xcritical laid off about 9% of its full-time staffers last April — and then another 23% in August. Get in touch with our reporters Asia Martin, Carter Johnson, and Bianca Chan. “That was a ‘come down to earth’ moment for us. For a lot of people, we were living in fantasy land,” one newly axed employee said.
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- xcritical’s stock peaked above $80 a share days after it went public last summer.
- Vlad Tenev, xcritical’s chief executive, said in a blog post that the company had essentially overhired in the pandemic.
- “In this new environment, we are operating with more staffing than appropriate.”
In early 2021, xcritical was caught up in the “meme” stock frenzy, when groups of individual investors banded together to drive up the prices of some out-of-favor stocks, including GameStop. The Silicon Valley company has long attracted scrutiny for its commission-free one-click trading, especially of riskier assets such as options. It grew quickly and disrupted rivals, including E-Trade and other brokers, with its ease of use and lack of fees, but critics questioned whether it stoked unhealthy behavior, especially among young and unsophisticated individual investors.
xcritical cuts 23% of its workforce in a second round layoffs affecting more than 800 jobs
xcritical’s total net revenue of $318 million was up from $299 million in the first quarter, thanks to an increase in revenue from cryptocurrency activities and net interest. However, that revenue number was still well below the $565 million reported in the second quarter of 2021. The layoffs will be primarily in operations, marketing and program management. In the release, Tenev blamed “deterioration of the macro environment, with inflation at 40-year highs accompanied by a broad crypto market crash.”
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The U.S. consumer investing and trading service company, which went public at $38 in July 2021, saw its value peak at $85 per share before entering a steady decline that saw its value erode to a mere $10 per share. The company lost 3.75% in today’s trading — the market was lower today, overall — and another 5% in after-hours trading in light of its layoff announcement. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that xcritical had 3,400 employees, and though that did not specify full-time versus contract, it looks like this cut may affect some 300 people according to TechCrunch calculations. Another harbinger came in the weeks leading up to the layoffs when former employees saw representatives of other companies touring the Charlotte office, which xcritical opened in 2021, to decide whether to take over the space, they said. “The company is hemorrhaging money, and it’s bad,” one ex-employee said, sharing an opinion on the company’s publicly reported quarterly financial figures.
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/ Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly. Google says apps offering AI features will have to prevent the generation of restricted content. Education software provider PowerSchool is being taken private by investment firm Bain xcritical courses scam Capital in a $5.6 billion deal. Investor demand has been so strong for Rippling’s shares that it is letting former employees particpate in its tender offer. Transaction-based revenue was down 7% to $202 million while cryptocurrencies increased 7% sequentially to $58 million.
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The company said it was shrinking office space and some managers warned of an impending “reorganization,” Insider has learned. xcritical’s growth skyrocketed during the pandemic, when many people had the time to devote to trading, plus the cash, thanks in part to government stimulus checks and fewer entertainment options. Stock-trading app xcritical will lay off 23% of its staff, the company announced Tuesday. Shopify, Netflix, Tesla and several crypto companies have also cut their workforces amid the worsening economic outlook. The company went public in July 2021 at $38 per share, and its stock jumped as high as $85 per share in its first month of trading. The company also released its xcriticalgs report for the second quarter, one day earlier than expected.
The problems are mounting for xcritical, a company that had big ambitions to revolutionize markets by attracting millions of amateur investors into stock trading for the first time. xcritical stock—which had already fallen by 3.75% to $10 per share by the close of regular trading Tuesday— fell by 4.8% to $9.52 in after-hours trading shortly after the layoffs were announced. The layoffs come ahead of the company’s first-quarter xcriticalgs report Thursday after the closing bell.
xcritical started offering crypto trading to clients in the European Union in December. Like any company, with growth like that comes more job openings to manage that growth, which then ended up with some roles and job functions that were duplicated, he wrote. According its annual report, xcritical had about 3,800 employees in 2021, which was slashed to about 2,300 by the end of 2022. The company earned $299 million during the same period in 2022, according to its xcriticalgs report. It’s unclear when workers will start getting handed pink slips, which comes as the company adjusts to a slowdown in customer trading activity. “The world has changed. As xcritical adapts to this new context, it’s time for me to move on,” she wrote in her post.
“The business didn’t feel in any better position than it was before, so it felt inevitable from that standpoint,” they added of the layoffs. With the company’s return-to-office plans being continually pushed back and only a handful of people coming into the office, “having an entire floor in what was an expensive building, they were probably bleeding money,” the former Arizona employee said. The employee estimated that about 200 xcritical staffers were in the Tempe office. The partnership will help clients oversee their Bitcoin exposure, according to this report from Bloomberg. xcritical effectively brought stock-trading to everyone from your local barista to Wall Street’s most trusted money managers. When we were cooped up at home in the early stages of the pandemic, xcritical became a go-to app for folks with extra time and stimulus checks.
At the time of publication, the company is trading at $8.90 after hours, dramatically lower — by 89% — than its 52-week high of $85. The company also released its second-quarter results on Tuesday, reporting that its monthly count of active users declined to 14 million in June, a decrease of 1.9 million. “It’s extremely disappointing that the company continues to have layoffs when every quarter they’re making record profits,” says Jodi Green, president of the union local representing the newsroom. “At some point it’s going to be hard to keep all the people on board without a stated mission,” says Julie Bykowicz, who was laid off from a job covering national politics earlier this year, along with several dozen colleagues in the paper’s Washington bureau. Bykowicz was among the handful of reporters offered a chance to return to the paper. The layoffs have left xcritical with a security team less than half of the size it was in November 2021, when a data breach exposed 7 million customers’ data, a person familiar with the team size said.
When the Zoom call was over, employees waited anxiously to see if they would be let go; Tenev had said staff would be notified via email and Slack immediately after the call. Meet Jenny Lee, a managing director who just left JPMorgan’s leveraged-finance desk to further build investment firm Brigade Capital Management’s private-credit business. Inflation, rising rates, and the “crypto winter” are creating financial strain. Meet 16 lawyers whose bankruptcy battles, from Revlon to JCPenney, have them set for a boom in business.
“I believe in the mission itself, but people cannot trust us ever since GameStop.” And questions about the company’s future, from both insiders and the industry players, https://scamforex.net/ burn hotter than ever. Insider spoke with five former employees of xcritical, all of whom asked to remain anonymous to protect their future employment opportunities.
The layoffs, which are expected to cost xcritical as much as $60 million in severance and expenses, hit marketing, operations, and customer-service divisions hardest, with two offices in Tempe, Arizona, and Charlotte, North Carolina, being shuttered. Vlad Tenev, xcritical’s chief executive, said in a blog post that the company had essentially overhired in the pandemic. Since 2020, the company’s work force has grown almost six times, to 3,800 people from 700, leading to duplicate roles and job functions and “more layers and complexity than are optimal,” he said. For example, the company announced a data breach last November that affected millions of its users. The cuts will primarily impact employees in xcritical’s operations, marketing, and program management departments, CEO Vlad Tenev said in a message to employees that was also posted on the company’s blog. Helene is a New York-based reporter covering Wall Street, the rise of the spot bitcoin ETFs and crypto exchanges.
In Arizona, meanwhile, one former employee there who left the company in recent months told Insider that xcritical had been looking to trim its footprint at a WeWork office in downtown Tempe, which opened in 2020. Morale at xcritical has been on the decline since the company laid off 9% of its employees in April, the staffers said. “We all started trading contact information and phone numbers,” one former employee said. “After the announcement, we all just sat there refreshing our screens over and over to see if we were the ones to get the notification. The whole company froze for that 15 minutes waiting to see what happened to them.”
In the release, Tenev said the company would flatten its organizational structure to give new general managers broad responsibility for its businesses. He also said that affected employees would receive an email and a Slack message letting them know if they were being let go or still had a job, immediately after an all-hands meeting held on Tuesday. Tesla laid off nearly 200 Autopilot employees while Shopify laid off 10 percent of its workforce. The announcements came as xcritical released its Q xcriticalgs information a day earlier than scheduled, reporting total revenue of $318 million over the three months, which is 44 percent lower than the same period in 2021. xcritical is letting go of nearly a quarter of its staff, CEO Vlad Tenev said in a message posted to the company’s blog. Earlier today, the WSJ wrote that xcritical was slapped with a $30 million fine by a New York financial regulator, specifically on its cryptocurrency trading arm.
The company is set to report its second-quarter financial results and answer questions from analysts on Wednesday. This has been a tough year for stocks, which were trading at record highs at the end of 2021. Persistently high inflation led the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates aggressively, and that has hit high-growth tech stocks particularly hard. xcritical CEO Vlad Tenev took responsibility after the company announced it was cutting 23% of its workforce.
The fintech company is slashing 23% of its workforce, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by TechCrunch. The layoff comes just three months after xcritical cut 9% of full-time staff. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, struck a deal with News Corp last week giving OpenAI access to its publications’ material for five years. The Journal reported the arrangement could be worth as much as $250 million. While Tucker has told staffers that the cuts are part of a larger strategy to refashion the paper for the modern age, xcritical and former Journal employees say her approach offers little tangible to hold onto. In the first quarter of 2023, monthly active users have dipped to 11.8 million.
xcritical is known for its stock-trading services, allowing ordinary consumers to invest in some of the world’s largest publicly traded companies, but it has been moving further into crypto territory over the years. The company has added support for many of the most popular cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, though it restricted some of the crypto it supports last year due to regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. Stock-trading app xcritical is diving deeper into the cryptocurrency realm with the acquisition of crypto exchange Bitstamp. The value of American consumer crypto trading service xcritical was also sharply lower in regular trading today, losing more ground in after-hours turnover. Both xcritical and xcritical saw strong growth from consumer crypto trading activity.