Coinbase lays off almost 1,000 staff as crypto winter bites

Crypto exchange Coinbase is set to lay off almost 1,000 employees as the New York-listed firm seeks to slash costs in a restructuring.

It’s the latest in a string of successive job cuts at the firm after it let go of around 20% of its workforce last year amid a downturn in the crypto market.

The firm had 4,706 full-time staff in the Autumn of last year, company filings show, including a number in Europe. A spokesperson could not confirm how many UK employees were set to be laid off. The restructuring is expected to cost in the region of $149 million to $163 million, including up to $95 million in compensation awards to staff facing the sack.

A Coinbase spokesperson said: “In the face of increasingly challenging economic conditions, we made the difficult decision to start redundancy processes with a group of provisionally selected employees in Europe to reduce the size of our teams to strengthen our business and ensure we can weather anything else that comes our way.

“Europe remains a priority market for Coinbase and our commitment to bringing the benefits of crypto to this region is unchanged in light of these events. “

There were at least 27,000 layoffs at crypto firms worldwide in 2022, according to estimates by news site CoinDesk, as the plunging price of Bitcoin lead to the collapse of over a dozen crypto firms including the Bahamas-based exchange, FTX. The price of Bitcoin has dropped 54% over the past 12 months, while the share price of Coinbase has fallen as much as 83% over the same period, leading to the wealth of founder Brian Armstrong plummetting by a whopping $6.3 billion, based on his 19% ownership of the firm.

Coinbase is one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, with over 100 million users in the third quarter of 2022.