The logo of Sky Mavis is seen in a screenshot from a video of the company
Vietnam’s billion-dollar blockchain game developer Sky Mavis will lay off 21% of its workforce in a “strategic decision” to improve growth potential.
Co-founder Nguyen Thanh Trung said on Saturday that the layoff was not related to the company’s business performance.
The move is “to help the company focus on its main goals and achieve growth in 2025 and beyond.”
Sky Mavis did not spell out which departments will be downsized, but said laid off employees would receive a severance package and assistance in finding a new job.
It had around 250 employees globally last year, 200 of them working in HCMC.
Trung said recent global policy shifts are set to create waves in the cryptocurrency world in the near future, just like in 2018 when the company launched its blockchain game Axie Infinity.
The company would therefore prioritize development of Ronin, a blockchain platform which helps developers create games.
Ronin is also a cryptocurrency backed by Sky Mavis, and its value has jumped by 15% after Bitcoin bounced back in recent weeks and headed toward $100,000.
Sky Mavis, one of few Vietnamese companies with a billion-dollar valuation, dubbed unicorns, was founded in 2018 by Trung and four others.
The game was a hit during the Covid-19 period as it allowed players to make money from it.
In 2022 hackers stole more than $600 million from its Ronin network, forcing the company to make major changes to its system.
Ronin remains the third most-used blockchain in the world with 1.1 million daily active addresses, and the Ronin wallet has been downloaded over 10 million times, according to Trung.
