More tech layoffs: BitTorrent parent Rainberry, Inc. is closing a San Francisco office.
Rainberry Inc., the maker of μtorrent and BitTorrent software and a pioneering San Francisco company in decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing technology, is shuttering its Financial District headquarters office and laying off 92 employees, becoming the latest big name tech company to trim its downtown footprint.
In a mass layoff filing made public this week, Rainberry said it plans to close its office space at 222 Kearny St. and begin cutting jobs March 15. Some employees are being offered transfers to other jobs, according to the notice. The company may be relocating from San Francisco altogether. A representative of the company told me on Friday that Kearny Street was the only Rainberry office space but it will continue to maintain its mailing address, which corresponds to a post office mail box in West Portal. "BitTorrent will consolidate resources in the Asia-Pacific region and will continue to support our products," the representative said in an emailed statement."We are extremely proud of the innovative work produced by our team." Founded in 2004 by Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin, the company developed a protocol that enables the quick sharing of large files with minimal bandwidth, allowing the power of several home computers to replace the need for a large single-source server. At its peak in the early 2010s, BitTorrent had as many as a quarter billion active monthly users and the protocol accounted for virtually half of file-sharing bandwidth on the Internet. The software has often been used for sharing copyrighted media and contributed to the rise and popularity of internet piracy through Torrent file-hosting websites such as The Pirate Bay. Its popularity has comparatively declined in the age of low-cost streaming services for music, television and movies. In 2018 Rainberry was acquired by cryptocurrency startup Tron, which later introduced a BitTorrent cryptocurrency token, BTT. The token was aimed in part to help address Rainberry's longtime issue of monetizing its free software — which has traditionally made money through ads embedded in the program's user interface.
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