The San Francisco ETF issuer is down to about 155 people. CIO Matt Hougan says bitcoin has bottomed; the timing of the cuts suggests the firm is not banking on it.
Bitwise Asset Management laid off roughly 14 per cent of its staff last week, chief executive Hunter Horsley confirmed in an emailed statement first reported by Bloomberg on 11 August. Headcount at the San Francisco firm has fallen from about 180 to 155.
The firm's flagship product tells the story. The Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund, ticker BITW, has seen its net assets fall 31 per cent in the first seven months of 2026, a drop mirrored across most of the issuer's index and single-asset products. Bitwise makes its money from expense ratios on ETPs; a third fewer assets means a third less revenue, and payroll is the largest variable cost line at a firm of this scale.
Horsley framed the reduction as forward-looking. The move "equips us well for the ongoing growth we've seen this year and expect to continue as crypto further integrates into the global economy," he said in the statement. Chief investment officer Matt Hougan went further, telling Bloomberg that bitcoin's resilience against a run of negative news suggests the bear market has already bottomed.
That is one reading. Another is that the timing coincides with a broader retrenchment across issuers who staffed up during the 2024 spot-ETF boom and now find themselves carrying seats that inflows will not pay for. Coinbase let go of 14 per cent of its workforce in May; BitGo cut 15 per cent in June; Polygon Labs did a second round of layoffs in July. Bitwise's number lands squarely in the middle of that pattern.
The underlying market has been unforgiving. US spot bitcoin ETFs posted their weakest month on record in July, with net outflows led by IBIT and FBTC as institutional demand cooled. Bitcoin traded near $64,200 on 12 August, well below its March high. Ether and solana have held better relative to their own peaks but still trail 2025 exit levels. For a firm whose product suite spans an index fund, thematic ETPs and single-asset trusts, none of that composition helps.
Bitwise came into 2026 in an expansionary posture. In April it launched the first Avalanche ETF with a 5.4 per cent staking yield, filed an amended prospectus for a Hyperliquid ETF and shipped several other single-asset vehicles. Its Solana product, launched in January with 21Shares, drew inflows in the low hundreds of millions. Product coverage is not the problem; product coverage is what has been keeping the shop running as index products bleed. It is also what needs headcount to service, which is what makes a 14 per cent cut sting more than the number suggests.
For institutional allocators, Bitwise's cuts are less a signal about crypto sentiment than about how expense-ratio economics work under prolonged drawdowns. Asset managers who have been through this before, like BlackRock and Fidelity, subsidise product lines from the fee income of scale funds elsewhere; a pure-play issuer has no such cushion when its indexed AUM contracts. Bitwise's overall assets under management sit well below the threshold that makes staffing at 180 sustainable.
Nothing in the announcement identifies which teams took the losses. In practice, firms that have already gone through 2026 layoffs have concentrated cuts in growth, marketing and administrative roles rather than product management or capital markets, on the logic that market makers and authorised-participant relationships have to be preserved through the cycle. Bitwise would follow the same pattern if it is trying to protect the ETP franchise. Horsley did not confirm any of that in his statement.
The bigger question is whether Hougan is right about the cycle. If bitcoin bottomed in early August, Bitwise is trimming into a recovery and will be short-staffed when inflows return. If it did not, more issuers are going to be doing this before Christmas. Only a handful of firms in this segment have crossed 200 employees; the ones that have not are already the survivors of the last cycle, and payrolls are easier to shrink than to rebuild.
Bitwise has not disclosed severance terms or whether the reduction includes any executive departures. The layoffs took effect last week; Horsley described the process as complete. He also did not commit to a hiring freeze, which is the tell to watch: firms convinced the trough is behind them usually add back to sales and product before adding back to research.
