Decentral Block Post

Social media and tech giant Meta is reportedly gearing up for “large-scale layoffs” this week amid rising costs and a recent collapse of its share price.

According to Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report on Nov. 6 citing people familiar with the matter, the planned layoffs could impact thousands of employees in a broad range of divisions across Meta’s 87,000-strong workforce.

It is not currently understood whether the firm's Reality Labs division, which registered a $3.7 billion loss in the third quarter, would see staff cuts. 

Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would be focusing its investment on “a small number of high-priority growth areas," including its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Discovery Engine and its advertisement and business messaging platforms in addition to the Metaverse, stating: 

“So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year [...] In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”

Bitcoin (BTC) holders looking to avoid Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) may have gained a surprise ally — banks.

In his latest blog post, “Pure Evil,” Arthur Hayes, ex-CEO of crypto derivatives platform BitMEX, argued that banks may limit the impact of the CBDC “horror story.”

Hayes: Bitcoiners and banks stand against CBDC "dystopia"

CBDCs are currently in various stages of development worldwide.

Fans of financial sovereignty naturally fear and even despise them, as they imply total government control over everyone’s money and purchasing power — “a full-frontal assault on our ability to have sovereignty over honest transactions between ourselves,” says Hayes.

Among opponents of CBDCs are not only Bitcoiners, however. Sharing the cause will likely be the commercial banks they have sought to oust from power with BTC.

Over several years, social media influencers have earned a bad rep among regulators for shilling risky and unvetted tokens to millions of investors. Pursuing the crackdown on such scenarios, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reportedly issued a subpoena to influencers who were found promoting cryptocurrencies such as HEX, PulseChain and PulseX.

Swedish researcher Eric Wall shared an official letter from the SEC dated Nov. 1, which was addressed to influencers. It read:

“We believe that you may possess documents and data that are relevant to an ongoing investigation being conducted by the staff of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.”

The letter was accompanied by a subpoena that was issued as part of the investigation, which demanded the influencers in question to produce the required documents by Nov. 15, 2022.

While the HEX community members retaliated against the finding as fake news, Wall quickly pointed out that HEX information channels on Discord and Telegram were filled with information on preserving anonymity on data and discussions.