On February 5th, Thor, a project focused on payments, retirement planning, and healthcare access for contract labor, announced changes to its personnel and roadmap. CEO David Chin made the announcement on the Thor blog, stating the team is “making changes as we transition into bringing on revenue and customers.”

In the statement, Chin says Thor has been forced to lay off 50% of its staff and cites a need to “correct cash flow.” In order to achieve this, Chin claims the team has been focusing on acquiring new banking partners, institutional investors, and customers. Three agreements representing 8,500 contractors are said to have been signed by Thor and that it has a pipeline of $1.8 million in recurring revenue “that we will be closing in sales deals over the next year.”

Chin claims in the release that “If Thor had only built blockchain solutions, we would be in the same boat as many ICO’s with no adoption nor customers” and that “our token holders have been our number one priority from day one.” Chin further states that by this time next year Thor “plans to be in the top 10 of CoinMarketCap by introducing innovative ways to have contractors use the Thor Token.”

The announcement was not without fallout. Former chief designer, Matt Lawler, posted a series of videos criticizing the team. Lawler, who was laid off as part of the cuts, said he found the move “suprising because I always thought of myself as a co-founder.”

Lawler goes on to say that: “What Matt and Dave told me yesterday afternoon is that they intend to pursue a SaaS model business, which frankly means that’s an intention to abandon crypto and abandon the THOR token so that they can go sell a business payments platform to businesses, while not having made any progress on giving benefits to contractors. I don’t know what they have up their sleeves over there, but last I heard yesterday, there was no utility in the making for THOR.”

Director of legal and business development for Thor, Ben Lambert, responded to Lawler’s comments on the Thor Telegram channel stating: “There are fundamental differences between how we envision driving token value and what Matthew believes is the best path forward.  For us, we value long-term growth and sustainability. For Matthew, he would like to utilize the THOR token immediately without weighing the legal/regulatory impact. For obvious reasons, I do not agree. We have never been a company that takes regulatory short cuts and we won’t start now to satisfy the wants of one team member.”

On Thursday night, Aphelion Exchange, the only platform to trade the THOR token announced that it would be delisted.

In the Aphelion Telegram group, CEO Ian Holtz cited the video from Lawler and stated: “Our understanding is that they have abandoned the token, if that changes so can their listing status.”

Thor, however, maintains that it has not abandoned its token and rejects the claims made by Lawler, posting on Twitter: “Thor has many plans to use the token. No reason to follow defamations by former employees as truth.”

Thor recently released an updated 2019 roadmap with a focus on “building out Odin’s capabilities” – a payments system is designed to manage payments, including instant payments and incentive payments, to a workforce of “1099” contract laborers, and “bringing ThorCare to market” – a type of group-plan healthcare that Thor claims is not currently available to contractors.

Thor also recently announced three new advisory board members: Steve Skodak, CEO of the Painting Contractors Association (PDCA), Chris Shapouri, president of Mobile Charging Lockers, and Luke Diaz, the director of strategic partnerships at Alto Pharmacy.

Tags: