Stephen Alpher
Stephen Alpher is CoinDesk's co-regional news chief, Americas. He holds BTC and ETH above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.
Unchained Capital reduced its workforce by about 15% and moved its head of business development Parker Lewis to the board of directors as well as chief product officer Will Cole to a senior advisory role.
In a blog post discussing the jobs cuts, co-founder and CEO Joe Kelly said on Friday that while Unchained has never had exposure to FTX, Alameda, or any other institutions which have lost client funds, "funding for bitcoin-backed loans has been materially constrained by recent market events."
He noted that his company is seeing record numbers of new clients, bitcoin deposits and trading volumes, and the loan book currently has a 214% collateral-to-principal ratio.
"We have admittedly made mistakes along the way," wrote Parker Lewis in a separate blog post discussing the moves. "Despite having weathered every storm without incurring a loan loss, we expanded the team quicker than we otherwise would have had we better accounted for the current market environment."
