Friday, 06 January 2023

Partners

Good morning!

It's Dennis here.

Another shoe drops in Amazon. The retail giant currently undergoing massive expansion across the world said it will have to let go of 18,000 staff members, citing changing global economic outlook.

This comes after tech companies pursued new paths to profitability, rolling out multiple subscription products as their CEOs failed to impress investors in the first quarter of 2022.

"Companies that last a long time go through different phases. They’re not in heavy people expansion mode every year," Amazon's CEO, Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff. This underscores that the shadows of budget cuts that trailed tech companies last year have followed them into the new year.

If this newsletter was forwarded to you, click here to subscribe now.

Below are the tech stories and news you need to know to start your day, carefully curated by Technext.

Summary of the news

Amazon said it will layoff 18,000 employees
Ethereum surpassed Bitcoin in transaction volume last year
Twitter has experienced its biggest data breach ever, affecting over 235 million accounts
Crypto lost $4 billion last year

Amazon begins 2023 with additional staff layoff

Amazon says it plans to lay off more than 18,000 employees as the global economic outlook continues to worsen, CNN reports.

Amazon’s layoff has continued in 2023 as the company’s CEO, Andy Jassy, shared a message with the employees yesterday, briefing them on the new updates on role elimination, Technext reports.

Several teams will be affected, including the human resources department and Amazon Stores, according to the memo from Jassy. “Companies that last a long time go through different phases. They’re not in heavy people expansion mode every year,” he said.

Jassy had said in November that job cuts at the e-commerce giant would continue into early 2023. Multiple outlets reported in the fall that Amazon had planned to cut around 10,000 employees.

Amazon and other tech firms significantly ramped up hiring over the past couple of years as the pandemic shifted consumers’ habits toward e-commerce.

Now, many of these seemingly untouchable tech companies are experiencing whiplash and laying off thousands of workers as people return to pre-pandemic habits and macroeconomic conditions deteriorate.

A word from Fincra

Payment collection just got easier on Fincra!

Accept payments from your customers via debit/credit cards, bank transfers or PayAttitude and settle these payments to your Fincra wallet or your bank account.

As a business, you only need to create easy-to-share payment links from the Fincra merchant portal or embed payment buttons on your online platform to gain access to Fincra Checkout; no coding is required.

CTA: Create an account in less than 2 minutes and Try Fincra checkout here

Ethereum surpassed Bitcoin in transaction last year

The total transactions on the Ethereum network tore through that of Bitcoin by more than fourfold in 2022, data from DollarGeek has shown, Nairametrics reports.

Data from Nasdaq and Ycharts have also shown that there were 338% more Ether transactions in 2022 (408.5 million) than Bitcoin transactions (93.1 million).

This notwithstanding, Bitcoin managed to retain its crown when it comes to online search interest, according to google trend searches. About 28.41 million people googled Bitcoin during the year.

The Ethereum blockchain averaged a daily transaction count of around 1.1 million for ETH, while that of Bitcoin’s network stood at 255,000 for BTC.

Although the Ethereum network led the charge, transaction volumes on the Bitcoin network were steadier and more periodic than on the Ethereum network, which experienced much more volatility in transaction volumes.

This was due to spikes in demand at certain times such as NFT launches and other gas fee-intensive events such as XEN minting.

A word from Polygon

Polygon is a decentralised Ethereum scaling platform that enables developers to build scalable user-friendly dApps with low transaction fees without ever sacrificing security.

Click here for more.

Twitter experiences biggest data breach

According to recent reports, the safety of over 235 million Twitter accounts was compromised when their associated email addresses, usernames, and dates of account creation were made public on an online forum for anybody to download, Appauls reports.

Over 63GB of data was exposed in the ‘largest Twitter data leak ever,’ including a wide variety of sensitive information that could seem harmless at first glance but, in the wrong hands, could cause significant damage.

Accounts like the ones that were compromised are easy to hack into and might do serious harm to the community if they aren’t secured. The information leaked might be used to break into high-security accounts, according to Alon Gal, co-founder of an Israeli security company. He states, “There is no doubt that hacking groups around the world will also use this database to further compromise the privacy of our users,”

According to The Washington Post, the data was compiled in late 2021. Due to a fault in Twitter’s system, third parties that already possessed an email address or phone number were able to search for accounts that had shared it with Twitter before that time. This made it possible for these records to be assembled at that time. You could then use automated lookups to verify an infinite number of email addresses or phone numbers.

Crypto lost $4B in 2022

Immunefi’s Crypto Losses 2022 report found over $3.9 billion was “lost” last year, TechCrunch reports. While that might seem like a whopping amount of capital to lose track of, it’s down 51.2% compared to 2021, when over $8 billion was stolen, the report found.

Crypto losses are defined as a combination of hacks and alleged fraud incidents, Adrian Hetman, tech lead of the triaging team at Immunefi said. In 2022, the majority of losses, or $3.77 billion, were from hacks across 134 specific incidents. About $175 million was lost to fraud across 34 incidents in the same time frame.

Both decentralized finance (DeFi) and centralized finance (CeFi) experienced major catastrophic events, including the implosion of the Terra/LUNA ecosystem and the downfall of the centralized crypto exchange FTX. But overall, DeFi was the main target for (successful) exploits at over 80%, Immunefi stated.

DeFi losses increased 56.2% from over $2 billion across 107 incidents in 2021 to $3.18 billion across 155 incidents in 2022. CeFi losses, meantime, fell 87.3% from $6 billion across nine incidents in 2021 to $768.8 million across 13 incidents in 2022.