(Bloomberg) -- Kraken named Stephanie Lemmerman as chief financial officer, the latest executive suite reshuffling by the US crypto exchange as part of wide-ranging restructuring announced this week.
Lemmerman, who served as CFO at Dapper Labs Inc., will maintain a link to the crypto software development company as a board member, Kraken said in a statement Thursday. Current CFO Carrie Dolan, who announced plans earlier this year to step down, will continue to support the company through the transition, Kraken said.
On Wednesday, Kraken named Arjun Sethi, co-founder of venture firm Tribe Capital, as co-CEO of the company alongside Dave Ripley. The firm is reducing about 15% of it workforce, or about 400 employees, according to a person familiar with the layoffs. The cuts were first reported by the New York Times. A Kraken spokesperson has declined to comment on the number of employees fired.
As part of a dramatic executive-suit clearout, Chief Product Officer Gilles BianRosa and Chief Technology Officer Vishnu Patankar have left the company, the person said. Kraken declined to comment on specific departures. BianRosa and Patankar didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The layoffs are the latest in a flurry of job cuts in crypto, where a market rally over the past year has been focused largely on Bitcoin rather than broadening out to deliver a wider lift for the sector. Kraken said it had more than $1 billion in revenue.
Kraken also laid off 30% of its staff, or about 1,100 people, in 2022, as crypto market conditions worsened. Jesse Powell, the outspoken and often controversial co-founder of Kraken, stepped down as CEO in September of 2022 to spend more time on the company’s products and broader industry advocacy. That year, Powell encouraged any “woke” employees who can’t align with the company’s culture and values to leave.
But 2024 has been considered a good year for many crypto companies, with Bitcoin hitting an all-time high in March and the debut of Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds in the US.
Through the tribulations of the last several years, Kraken’s overall market share hasn’t changed much, even as rivals like Binance and others made gains. Kraken’s 1.38% share of the spot market is below last October’s 2.54%, according to researcher CCData. While it’s 0.46% share of the global derivatives market is an increase from a year ago, the percentage is half of what it was in May, CCData said.
Kraken is also still embroidered in litigation with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which sued it last year, alleging Kraken operated as an unregistered exchange, broker, dealer and clearing agency. In February 2023, Kraken settled separate charges with the SEC over its staking business.
(Updates with market-share data and prior departures, starting in the sixth paragraph.)
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