The current turmoil in the cryptocurrency market has forced a number of companies in the space to shift their strategy and come up with new approaches that can help them pull through the downtrend. Crypto.com is also doing the same as it announced that they are making changes to their rewards program called Crypto Earn. The company has decided to remove 15 cryptocurrencies from the said program.

Changes made to the Earn program

There are some prominent coins that have been removed from the Crypto.com earn program and these include Shiba Inu (SHIB), Dogecoin (DOGE), FLOW, and Tezos (XTZ). There have also been some additions made to the program, which include NEAR, Fantom (FTM), and Ziliqa (ZIL).

In addition, the reward rates have also been changed by Crypto.com on five of the stablecoins that are part of the program. These include TUSD, TAUD, USDP (Paxos USD), and TCAD. The stablecoins that are included in the program are pegged to various fiat currencies. But, Crypto.com did not change the reward rates applicable to other cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Polygon, Ethereum, Avalanche and Solana.

This is not the only change that Crypto.com has made in the current market conditions. Two weeks earlier, it had also announced that it was laying off 5% of its workforce in order to get through the market turmoil. It is not the only exchange to have made this decision, as others like Gemini and Coinbase also stated that they were going to lay off their staff and impose a hiring freeze in order to survive the bear market.

Mixed reactions

The announcement from Crypto.com has earned mixed reactions from the crypto community. Some people demanded an explanation for the removal of coins like SHIB and DOGE, as these are the two biggest memecoins that exist in the crypto market and have a huge following.

Some users were also displeased with the low rate of interest that the platform is offering. Some said that the exchange had lowered the interest offered on stablecoins and said that there was no point in using the Earn program because it was offering the same interest rate as that of traditional banks.

The majority of the reactions were of disappointment with this move. However, there were also users who asserted that Crypto.com had been taking steps to promote sustainability in the long term. The ongoing crypto winter has made things difficult for exchanges and this move could help Crypto.com in surviving it.

The Earn program introduced by Crypto.com is meant to help users who have crypto assets to generate income from them by locking them on the exchange. This program is quite similar to what is usually offered in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. It is how lending protocols like Celsius Network operate. Once these tokens are locked, the exchange pays interest to the owners, but it is given after a certain time period. In times of falling prices, the demand for crypto assets falls, which makes it difficult for platforms to continue offering the same returns.