External commentators on layoffs lack crucial context like severance details or the humanity of the process. The true measure of a company's integrity during downsizing is not public opinion but the sentiment expressed by the actual employees who were let go.
When announcing layoffs, corporate messaging must focus exclusively on celebrating and supporting departing employees. The speaker learned that mentioning the company's own financial success, such as record revenue, in the same announcement is a critical error that comes across as tone-deaf and disrespectful.
Companies like Circle (stablecoins) and Securitize (tokenization) become the only public market vehicle for a specific macro trend. This unique position causes their stock to trade based on the narrative and investor demand for exposure, decoupling their valuation from traditional financial metrics.
The crypto community often criticizes platforms like Solana for paying partners like Western Union. However, this "pay-to-play" model is a standard business development strategy used by giants like Amazon (for Alexa) and Facebook to bootstrap their ecosystems and kickstart the flywheel with marquee partners.
Blockworks is focusing its distribution on podcasts and newsletters to cultivate an "owned" audience with high loyalty. This is a strategic pivot away from relying on news-driven website visits, which constitute a less predictable "rented" audience that is harder to monetize for new data products.
Blockworks shut its news division not just for focus, but because it couldn't give the journalists the top-level attention they deserved. Keeping a deprioritized unit starves its talented employees of resources and opportunity, making it better to let them go where they can be a primary focus.
The last decade of crypto focused on moving assets like Bitcoin on-chain. The next, more significant mega-trend will be the migration of entire companies and their real-world revenue streams onto blockchains, involving both crypto-native firms and traditional giants like BlackRock and Stripe.
Unlike networks such as Visa that strive for neutrality, Stripe's launch of its own blockchain, Tempo, is an opinionated play. This forces other payment service providers into a dilemma: using Tempo means actively helping their biggest competitor, Stripe, build a moat and capture more of the value chain.