The nonprofit organization NEAR Foundation, which is developing its namesake ecosystem, is undergoing a reorganization and plans to lay off approximately 40% of its workforce.

Ilya Polosukhin, the company's CEO, explained this decision as follows: "Together with the NEAR Foundation board, we conducted a thorough analysis of our operations. During the process, we heard feedback that the foundation wasn't always as efficient as it could be, sometimes moving slowly and attempting to do too many things at once. We have decided to consolidate our team to focus on a narrower range of activities."

This reorganization will affect 35 employees, primarily from the marketing, business development, and community departments. However, the project's engineering team will continue to operate as usual, emphasized Polosukhin. He also stressed that NEAR Foundation still maintains a strong financial position, with assets including over $285 million in fiat, 305 million NEAR tokens (worth over $1 billion at the time of writing), and $70 million in investments and loans.

The price of the NEAR token has increased by more than 15% in the last 24 hours and is trading at around $3.8 (according to CoinGecko). However, this is still an 82% decrease compared to the highest price recorded in January 2022 at $20.44. It is important to note that in June 2023, NEAR Foundation entered into a partnership with the cloud service of the Chinese tech giant Alibaba.