In a post addressed to ‘Steemians’, CEO of Steemit Ned Scott has announced that they have “been forced to lay off close to 70% of the team”.

Reasons given for the reorganisation include, “weakness of the cryptocurrency market that has resulted in low fiat returns on our automated selling of STEEM diminishing”.

Crypto commentator Hasu was surprised at the announcement given “they mined & auto-sold almost 1/3 of the entire token supply over the years”.

Looks like Steemit, Inc. is close to going belly-up and laid off 70% of their staff. How is that even possible when they mined & auto-sold almost 1/3 of the entire token supply over the years?

Must be a blatant case of treasury mismanagement/negligence. https://t.co/Zov3AREyHN — Hasu (@hasufl) November 28, 2018

He went on to speculate that it “must be a blatant case of treasury mismanagement/negligence”.

Ned Scott went on to lay out the cost reduction options that include “replacing steemd plugins with hivemind, pitchforking Steem to prune the chain state size from 160gb to 0gb, AWS usage projections, DevOps solutions, reduction of Staging and Testing nodes, and eliminating redundancies”.

Pivot to blockchain assets

Ned did still seem optimistic as he looked to pivot the Steemit project (and brand) away from the core social product by stating that “Steem can be by far the best – and lowest cost – blockchain protocol for applications”.

he concluded: “Over the next several weeks, I hope to share the assets we have created with you, including showing you how their success would be a benefit to Steem and cryptocurrency in general.”