Coinbase has laid off 14% of its workforce as artificial intelligence has led the company to “an inflection point,” CEO Brian Armstrong wrote Tuesday.
“The biggest risk now is not taking action,” he wrote in a company blog post, published after roughly 700 employees were let go. “We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core.”
Engineers today use AI to complete a task that used to take teams weeks, he said, with non-technical teams “now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.”
The other factor in play for the layoffs, Armstrong wrote, is that crypto is in a down market, and Coinbase “need[s] to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth.”
Coinbase joins a growing list of companies swapping out workers for AI, following cuts by Block, Crypto.com and Bolt this year.
“Companies that do not make this pivot immediately [toward AI] will fail,” Crypto.com founder and CEO Kris Marszalek wrote in March on social media site X, when his company laid off roughly 180 workers worldwide. “Companies that move slowly will be left behind. Companies that move immediately and pair the best AI tools with top-performers will achieve a level of scale and precision that was previously impossible.
“This is where we must go,” he wrote.
Coinbase is “fundamentally changing how we operate,” Armstrong said, by “rebuilding” the company “as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.”
That means flattening the company’s management structure to five layers, at most, below CEO and COO, with more people reporting to each leader, and no one being management-only. The company’s cost structure, he said, will be more resilient to the market because of it.
“Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams,” he said.
As of December, the firm employed 4,951 people, according to its 10K filing.
Affected U.S. employees will receive 16 weeks’ pay plus two weeks per year worked, their next equity vest and six months of health insurance. Workers on a visa will get transition support, and employees outside the U.S. will receive similar support based on local factors.
More details on Coinbase’s expense outlook will be shared during the company’s quarterly earnings call Thursday, Armstrong said.
The crypto firm has had a busy last year. After inking partnerships with JPMorgan and Citi in 2025, it nabbed a conditional bank charter last month from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
