Joe Lubin’s ConsenSys Reportedly Shutters Operations in India and Philippines

Ethereum blockchain development firm ConsenSys has reportedly shuttered its operations in India and Philippines “due to a realignment of the sales and services team” in the two countries. This, according to a report by Coindesk, December 11, 2019.

Company Realignment to Blame

Joe Lubin, one of the co-founders of Ethereum blockchain reportedly informed ConsenSys teams in India and the Philippines to shut down their operations. According to Coindesk, one of the members of the seven-person team in India has confirmed that the local offices and the ones in the Philippines have been shut down.

ConsenSys spokesperson Kara Miley told Coindesk:

“A total of 11 roles were eliminated in India and the Philippines due to a realignment of the sales and services team in those countries.”

This chain of events mirrors developments reported by BTCManager in December last year, when ConsenSys, Steemit, and SpankChain axed their staff due to the then crypto winter. At the time, Lubin had asked ConsenSys employees to be more focused and competitive “in an increasingly crowded field.” He said:

“We’re going to get a lot more rigorous in terms of milestones and timetables, even if that means dissolving projects if we’ve come to the conclusion that our earlier assumptions were incorrect.”

The latest cut-offs will significantly dent ConsenSys India’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) initiatives. The blockchain firm was involved in several high-profile DLT projects in India in areas such as healthcare, land tilting, and education.

Similarly, in June last year, BTCManager reported how rural banks in the Philippines had joined blockchain bandwagon when they declared that they’d be using ConsenSys’ Ethereum blockchain system to facilitate real-time transactions.

In Limbo Crypto Market a Death Sentence for Businesses

Slow market movements typically tend to dry up business operations of the various players in the industry. This phenomenon was refreshed in November last year when decentralized social media platform Steemit laid off over 70 percent of its staff due to the cryptocurrency market crash.

On a more recent note, in March 2019, crypto firm First Digital Assets announced that it was laying off staff in light of the bear-trodden cryptocurrency market.