Because of the crisis in the crypto industry, the Viennese financial service provider Bitpanda is reducing staff on a large scale.

According to an open letter, more than a quarter of the thousand employees have to go.

Apparently, the cryptocurrency exchange is suffering from the decline of this asset class.

The significant reduction in staff is surprising.

After all, the young company was still looking for new staff until recently - and advertised "unlimited vacation".

Michael Seiser

Business correspondent for Austria and Hungary based in Vienna.

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Employees are not only being laid off in Vienna, but at a total of more than ten locations in the EU: The three founders Eric Demuth, Paul Klanschek and Christian Trummer said that nobody can currently say when the crypto market will recover and Bitpanda will start to pick up again With.

Now they are trying to reorganize.

In the message to the workforce, the three also admitted to mistakes, they said they had grown too quickly.

Basically, the founders were in a positive mood that things would go up again.

The company wants to help those affected by the layoffs to find new jobs.

There will also be free psychological help, the management announced.

Bitpanda currently has more than ten nodes across Europe, including a location in Vienna, as well as Amsterdam, Barcelona, ​​Berlin, Bucharest, Dublin, Krakow, London, Madrid, Milan and Zurich.

Users can trade Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies and gold via the platform of the start-up Bitpanda, which is present in Germany with the app of the same name, among other things.

The fintech was founded in 2014 and is valued at more than one billion dollars.

It claims to have more than three million users.

This makes it one of the most thriving fintech platforms in Europe.

The company has set itself the goal of

Bitpanda was Austria's first so-called unicorn.

This is a start-up company that is valued at more than one billion dollars.

Several young Austrian companies had recently reached this threshold.

The start-up investor i5invest counts six of these unicorns in Austria.

The best-known among them is Bitpanda, the tutoring specialist via online GoStudent.