GameStop Cuts More Staff—Including Crypto Wallet Engineers

By Andrew Hayward

Video game retailer GameStop has laid off another round of employees today ahead of its upcoming earnings report, according to reports and social media posts from affected individuals. The team behind the company's crypto wallet was particularly hard hit, according to Axios.

Daniel Williams, GameStop’s Lead Software Engineer, posted on LinkedIn earlier today that there was “another big round of layoffs at GameStop currently in progress,” including ecommerce product and engineers employees—”lots of them,” he added. In a follow-up comment, Williams said that a company announcement is due later today.

Multiple former employees have shared public status updates about the layoffs on LinkedIn today, including blockchain and iOS engineer Brandon Jenniges, who wrote that he was impacted by the company’s move.

GameStop launched an NFT marketplace this year that focuses on the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly on the Immutable X sidechain. In May, the company announced the launch of its own Ethereum wallet—a browser-based plugin similar to MetaMask.

Ethan Gach, senior reporter at gaming publication Kotaku, tweeted late this afternoon that GameStop CEO Matt Furlong confirmed layoffs in an email to employees.

"We've continued to gain clarity regarding the right level of corporate staff needed to achieve our profitability and growth goals," Furlong reportedly wrote in the email.

GameStop did not immediately respond to Decrypt's request for comment.

The company's third-quarter fiscal earnings report is scheduled for Wednesday, December 7.

GameStop last held layoffs in July amid the departure of CFO Michael Recupero, but the company did not disclose how many people were terminated.

The NFT marketplace has not made a significant impact on the space. As of October 31, NFT analytics platform DappRadar reported that the platform had yielded just $29 million worth of trades since the July launch. For context, OpenSea, the largest marketplace for Ethereum NFT trading, regularly pulls in more than $6 million in daily volume, even now in a bear market. DappRadar is no longer tracking GameStop’s NFT activity.

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