Ethereum development company ConsenSys will be cutting 97 jobs, said CEO Joe Lubin in a blog post on Wednesday, confirming, for the most part, a report by CoinDesk last week.

"Today we need to make the extremely difficult decision to streamline some of ConsenSys' teams to adjust to challenging and uncertain market conditions," wrote Lubin. "This decision will impact a total of 97 employees, which represents 11% of ConsenSys' total workforce."

Departing ConsenSys employees globally will receive generous severance packages based on tenure and an extended option exercise window from 12 months to 36 months, according to the blogpost. There will also be personalized support from an external placement agency and extension of healthcare benefits in relevant jurisdictions, it said.

The New York City-headquartered ConsenSys, which currently has about 900 employees, is just one of the many crypto companies forced to lay off staff in a grinding bear market that has claimed an estimated 27,000 jobs across the industry since April.

Lubin underscored the financial strength of ConsenSys, saying the difficult decision to streamline would focus the firm's strategy on its core products and exploring new opportunities in Web3 commerce as it evolves into the mainstream.

"We're keeping the company strong; we didn't cut into muscle," Lubin said in an interview with CoinDesk. "We sort of right-sized support functions, some customer support, some internal team support, because there's just less activity in our ecosystem right now. I expect we'll get back to doing quite significant and surging business in the not too distant future."

CeFi censure

As well as taking stock of macroeconomic headwinds and geopolitical uncertainty, Lubin also took the opportunity to censure the behavior of crypto centralized finance (CeFi) companies.

"If we hadn't had such ridiculous behavior and such a cataclysmic collapse in the CeFi part of our ecosystem, then my guess is those CeFi actors would have continued to play their games and continue to get away with it," he said.

Lubin said it was extremely unfortunate that such a lot of people have also been harmed in the process of CeFi actors self-identifying in 2022, but ultimately benefit will accrue to the crypto ecosystem and beyond.

"It will highlight what's good in tech crypto: decentralized mechanisms, not exploiting consumers by providing easy access to that mechanism. And even more importantly, hopefully all of this is really good for the general world of finance, because it points out that decentralization: good. Centralization: often not so good."