That's actually a pretty bad and scary news. I have never heard any legit blockchain project laying off 70% of their project, especially when there is so much to develop. Ned says the company doesn't have enough money to even handle nodes. That sounds like they are in deep water now. SMT which was supposed to be their main booster for "to the moon" and adoption has also been delayed for who knows how long. But the thing that surprises me is that how they didn't make the most of during the bull run in Q1-Q2 this year.
Let's see how this one goes.
1. The blockchain developers didn't get laid off.
2. They have $30 million worth of STEEM left in public company accounts.
https://steemit.com/@steemit/transfers https://steemit.com/@steem/transfers https://steemit.com/@misterdelegation/transfers3. Costs apparently got out of way out of control due to being overly optimistic about high crypto prices earlier this year and having lofty goals. Not so good, but good that they caught it before all the funds were gone and decided to downsize
4. Nodes were very expensive, costing them $2 million/year. They are working on optimizing the costs. Plus really they should encourage other people to run their own nodes. I've never heard of another project that pays for everyone else's node.
I bet a lot of cryptos are in a similar position but they're less open about it.
Pretty sure you are right.
One good thing is that they wont have to keep selling Steem to pay all those staff. I'm sure that's been one of the reasons why Steem has fallen further than some coins.
Agree, but remember there is still the other 30% and still a lot of non-employee costs (office, travel, legal, operations for the web site, etc.)
gl with that 
