Seattle-based cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex is laying off 83 employees, according to the U.S. Employment Security Department’s layoff alert. Bittrex has 284 staffers according to LinkedIn’s database. “The market downturn triggered by multiple failures in the crypto ecosystem became an outright collapse by the end of the year. These events have caused us to reset our strategy,” Bittrex co-founder Richie Lai told employees in an internal email leaked on Twitter. Last October, Bittrex was fined US$29 million by the U.S. Treasury Department for failing to block people from sanctioned jurisdictions from accessing the trading platform. (forkast)

Data from the popular crypto tracking platform, Whale Alert showed that exactly 4,124,254,650 XRP coins were sent out of Bittrex to different cold wallets by anonymous whales on Wednesday. Noteworthy is that the huge XRP withdrawal from the popular centralized exchange was executed in nine transactions. 

Single whale withdraws 4.1B XRP from Bittrex to different unknown wallets.