Steemit Inc, the company behind the popular Steemit platform that uses blockchain technology to reward users for creating and curating content, has recently revealed it’s set to lay off 70% of its staff to reduce operating costs, as it’s restructuring its organization to stay afloat during the bear market.

Through an announcement posted on YouTube, Steemit’s CEO Ned Scott revealed that in the past few months the firm was “relying on projections of basically a higher bottom for the market” while it was building up its team. The recent slump, he added, saw the firm lay of “more than 70%” of its organization to start restructuring. He added:

The team has met to discuss strategies and prioritizations for cost reductions, with the ultimate goal of getting back to thriving by innovating and building. We’re committed to being transparent throughout this process where the company reorganizes.

In the long run, Scott noted Steemit Inc would like to be able to make the Steemit platform sustainable, as well as all of the apps built on top of it. To do so, it’s set to find ways to keep the costs of running the platform down.

The Steem blockchain is notably one of the few some analysts in the space consider having a working product. On the Steemit platform, users are able to create and curate content for STEEM and STEEM-backed dollar (SBD) rewards.

Currently, running a full node on the Steem blockchain is reportedly expensive, and given the crypto ecosystem’s drop rewards on the platform have significantly declined. According to CryptoCompare data the cryptocurrency’s price has in fact plummeted nearly 90% since its all-time high.

This, as it dropped from over 0.00058 BTC to 0.000086 BTC in the last few months. Steem is currently up 1.7% in the last 24-hour period.

Steem's price performance in the last few months

In his video, Scott noted that he joined the cryptocurrency space in 2013 because he “found and believed” in its potential to give everyone the “ability to have freedom in value transfer and value store like had never been offered to us by any technological innovations that have come prior.”

He stayed, he added, because he sees in crypto the potential to give everyone access to the tools that’ll allow people to have the freedoms above.