Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong announced on Tuesday that the company will lay off about 14%, or 660 employees, due to poor market conditions and challenges with artificial intelligence.
“Today I made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by approximately 14%,” Armstrong said in the X post, which he said was also an email sent to all cryptocurrency exchange employees. In it, he explains the “two forces” that drive companies to make layoff decisions.
“While we have successfully weathered this cycle many times before and emerged stronger on the other side, we are currently in a down market and now need to adjust our cost structure so that we become leaner, faster and more efficient during this period to achieve the next phase of growth,” the Nasdaq-listed company’s CEO said.
The second reason, he said, is artificial intelligence and how it changes the way Coinbase operates. “Over the past year, I’ve seen engineers use AI to do things in days that teams used to take weeks,” Armstrong said. “The speed a small, focused team can achieve has changed dramatically and is accelerating every day,” he added.
The CEO of Coinbase said that laid-off employees in the United States will receive at least 16 weeks of base pay, in addition to two weeks of severance pay for each year the company employs them. He also said those outside the United States would receive similar support under local laws.
“Over the past 13 years, we have weathered four cryptocurrency winters, gone public, and built the most trusted platform in our industry,” he said.
This year’s wave of cryptocurrency layoffs has highlighted the gap between two simple narratives: macro headwinds and the AI transformation. Algorand laid off 25% of its staff at the end of March, citing “uncertain global macro conditions” and the broader cryptocurrency downturn. In February this year, Gemini Space Station (GEMI) said it would cut about 200 positions, accounting for about a quarter of its total workforce. By mid-March, this number had increased to 30%. On Thursday, Crypto.com said it would lay off 12% of its workforce, or about 180 positions.
With the exception of Algorand, all others directly pointed to macro conditions, token price weakness, and a shift toward greater use of artificial intelligence in workflows.
