According to some reports, cryptocurrency payments company Wyre is said to be sunsetting its business.Wyre’s purported wind-down comes after another payments company, Bolt, in September following the cancellation of plans to acquire it. However, Wyre CEO Ioannis Giannaros told Axios that the company is “still in business” and is simply “scaling back.”
Wyre Cryptocurrency Payments Firm Allegedly Shutting Down, CEO Denies Reports of Winding Down Operations
On January 4, 2023, Axios released areportstating that digital currency payment platform Wyre is downsizing its operations. Additionally, several other reports about the situation originated from former employees and known parties. JD Ross, founder of music investment platform Royal.io , said:
Wyre appears to have gone out of business. Everyone on our shared Slack channel has been disabled except the GC. I am told there is no severance pay.
“We will continue to do everything we can, but I want everyone to be prepared for the fact that we will need to wind down operations in the coming weeks,” CEO Ioannis Giannaros wrote to staff in an email seen by Axios. News publication reporters Brady Dale and Lucinda Shen further detailed that a former Wire employee named Michael Staib wrote about the situation on Linkedin.
Wyre was considered a profitable company and had raised $29.1 million through nine different funding rounds. The company was founded in 2013 by Giannaros and Michael Dunworth, and Wyre’s peak valuation was $1.5 billion; Wyre was to have been acquired by payments company Bolt, but the deal fell through in September; shortly after Bolt withdrew the acquisition, Wyre’s CEO, Michael Dunworth, was hired by Bolt to take over the company. Dunworth stepped down from Wyre.
At the time, Bolt CEO Maj Kulvira said, ” We will continue our existing commercial partnership with Wyre, paving the way for crypto integration into our ecosystem and bringing Wyre’s innovative crypto infrastructure to the world.” In an email sent to Axios, Giannaros did not comment on Wyre, he further remarked.
We are still open for business but will be scaling back to plan our next steps.
What do you think about the news that Wyre is said to have shut down operations while the CEO says they are simply “scaling back” operations? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
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