According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, USD Coin (USDC) issuer Circle aims to increase its employment by 15-25% by 2023 despite the widespread trend of layoffs across the industry.

Circle is going against the grain of the business landscape by increasing its workforce at a time when most companies in its industry are downsizing in an effort to improve their financial situation.

The bitcoin business was responsible for 41% of all job losses that occurred in 2023. Polygon, Chainalysis, Bittrex, Huobi, Crypto.com, Coinbase, Gemini, Genesis, and Wyre are a few examples of major cryptocurrency companies that have greatly reduced their workforce.

The prolonged crypto winter and various crypto implosions, which wiped billions of dollars off the balance sheets of various connected companies, were major contributors to the decision by cryptocurrency corporations to reduce their workforce. However, these massive layoffs in the cryptocurrency business were not an isolated event. In the month of January, nearly 48,000 employees were laid off among just four companies: Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce.

After postponing the release of Circle to the public for a few months, the company has decided to hire more people to work on the project. In December 2022, Circle and Concord Acquisition reached an agreement to mutually cancel their intentions to go public together. Concord Acquisition is a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC). The transaction was first reported to be worth $4.5 billion in July 2021, but was later revised to a value of $9 billion in February 2022 as Circle’s value increased significantly.

According to Jeremy Fox-Geen, Circle’s CFO, the company has not abandoned its plans to go public; however, they are waiting until market circumstances improve. He went on to say that for public market investors to reassess the prospects of companies trading digital assets, the cryptocurrency sector needs more time after the Terra and FTX crashes.

The stablecoin issuer had about 900 workers at the end of 2022, and there are plans to increase the number of staff to between 135 and 225 in 2023. On the other hand, the expansion of staff is happening at a slower pace than in 2023. 2022, when the workforce more than doubled from 2021.

The USDC token, which is produced by Circle and currently has a market valuation of $42 billion, is the second largest stablecoin behind Tether (USDT) token.