Blockchain-based social media platform Steemit Inc., the company behind popular open source website Steemit.com, has announced a structural reorganization which will entail laying off 70 percent of its workforce as it looks for new ways to cut costs and remain sustainable as a business.In a heartfelt post published by Steemit's co-founder and CEO Ned Scott, the rest of the team will stay on to work on reducing the cost of running the Steemit platform and the company's public APIs.Scott attributed the decision to lay off the overwhelming majority of Steemit’s workforce to "the weakness of the cryptocurrency market, the fiat returns on our automated selling of STEEM diminishing, and the growing costs of running full Steem nodes.""We have conducted our first all-hands meeting and are prioritizing all the cost reduction solutions we can accomplish in the near term, including replacing steemd plugins with hivemind, pitchforking Steem to prune the chain state size from 160gb to 0gb, AWS usage projections, DevOps solutions, reduction of Staging and Testing nodes, and eliminating redundancies," Scott continues in the post.Steem is Steemit's native token, which was created in 2016 as a micropayment currency for tipping authors on the Steemit platform. The Steemit platform was created to be a decentralized version of Reddit, where contributors could be rewarded with steem for their posts. Other decentralized plat...
