Bitmain, a cryptocurrency mining firm that is based in Beijing, has been majorly popular recently for its firings of about 50% of the staff. However, in a recent blog post, it does not look like they are allowing this to take down their year.

As we move into 2019, we, at Bitmain, have been doing a bit of reflecting on what a year 2018 has been, as well as what we expect this coming year. Read on:https://t.co/BkIIWQuHBh

— BITMAIN [Not giving away ETH] (@BITMAINtech) January 20, 2019

The blog shows a list of all of the accomplishments that 2018 brought, giving the public an idea of what they have in store for the year. To elaborate, Bitmain said,

“Our wide portfolio and varied lines of work have expanded to a point where we have the problem of choice and this year was the time to choose.”

Continuing, the post said, “

We started to optimize the business and streamline our flows to focus back on the core missions and activities that best rally behind our vision.”

In a report by Finance Magnates, it is important to pay attention to the verbiage that Bitmain uses. The media website says,

“Reading between the lines here, however, one realizes that the words ‘optimize’, and ‘streamline’ actually refer to the sacrifices that the company has made–presumably because of decreased mining profitability.”

The layoffs that Bitmain imposed are hardly the only public sacrifice, but they have elicited the most attention in the industry. The rumors that these layoffs were imminent first came on China’s Maimai website, which is much like the United States’ LinkedIn website. On December 17th, one of the users on Maimai requested to learn more about Bitmain’s upcoming layoffs.

Not long after, a member of the Bitmain staff, who had been verified, responded,

“It’s affirmative. The layoff will start next week and involves more than 50 percent of the entire Bitmain’s headcount.”

Another staff member commented that there were some complete departments planned as part of the layoffs. By December, reports showed that Bitmain had 2600 layoffs, suggesting that 1300 staff members would no longer work with the mining firm.

December brought with it the first loss of whole departments, as the Israeli operations were ultimately stopped. The next to follow was the team who created the Copernicus system for Bitcoin Cash in December as well. By January 10th, news stations were reporting the shut down of their location in Rockdale, Texas, which was previously used for mining. At the point of closure, there were five staff members employed here.

Bitmain’s loss of mining dominance for Bitcoin is likely to be the catalyst for the cuts and layoffs. When it was in its heyday, Bitmain had 51% control over transactions involving Bitcoin, which has dropped to 21%, based on AntPool and BTC.com as its subsidiary pools.

BTC HODLers will see this change as something positive for Bitcoin network’s decentralization, it still shows that Bitmain has yet to gain its footing back. A Twitter post from BitAps.com says,

“Last 24 hours distribution. The mining distribution is almost such that the miner's share is no more than 10%, and, accordingly, 6 network confirmations provide complete protection against a double spend attack.”

Along with Bitmain, Huobi’s cryptocurrency exchange indicated that they would be performing layoffs as well recently. A spokeswoman for Huobi said that the platform planned to start “optimizing staffing by cutting its worst-performing employee,” which she stated on December 26th. However, at this point, there is no indication of how much staff will be lost.

GMO, an IT firm in Japan, announced a much direr decision to end their mining efforts. DMM.com has also announced that their mining operation would cease to exist.

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