On January 8, ShapeShift — which is a Swiss digital currency exchange — announced that it was laying off about one-third of its employees. Erik Voorhees, who is the CEO of the exchange, made the announcement in a tweet. Voorhees also issued a blog post accompanying the tweet. The post was entitled "Overcoming ShapeShift’s Crypto Winter and the Path Ahead," and it stated that the company was forced to act in response to the current bear market for cryptocurrencies. It further stated that the exchange's "greatest and worst financial decision [was] to embrace substantial exposure to crypto assets." Voorhees went on to say that the exchange suffered many issues last year. These issues included structural and personnel issues, legal issues, customer issues and financial issues. He concluded that it was the "confluence of these issues combined with our own lack of product focus that resulted in today’s layoff." The CEO further apologized to all those affected by the layoffs while still sounding optimistic about the future of digital assets. He said that these assets make it easy for individuals around the world to store and transfer value and that this power was "awesome and unprecedented." Recently, ShapeShift was one of the subjects of an extensive Wall Street Journal investigation. In September of last year, the newspaper alleged that nearly $90 billion in illegal funds made their way through nearly 50 cryptocurrency exchanges, including ShapeShift, which the Journal charged was responsible for $9 billion worth of these transfers. The exchange refuted the charges, with Voorhees insisting that they had worked with the Journal for nearly a half-year and had provided them with information that was either omitted from the report or misrepresented. ShapeShift is not the first cryptocurrency company to recently announce layoffs. Late last year, it was reported that ConsenSys — a blockchain software development company — had laid off 50-60% of a workforce consisting of 1,200 people. Joseph Lubin, who is the founder of ConsenSys, insisted at the time that the company was healthy and that it was simply "rebalancing" its priorities and activities. He also said that the company is continuing to hire.