Leading crypto exchange Coinbase has announced that it is laying off 18 percent of its workforce, or about 1,100 jobs amid the economic downturn.

New Delhi: Leading crypto exchange Coinbase has announced that it is laying off 18 percent of its workforce, or about 1,100 jobs amid the economic downturn. Brian Armstrong, CEO and co-founder said that while the company tried its best to get this just right, in this case, it is now clear that it is over-hired. The company said that at the beginning of 2021, it had 1,250 employees. Cryptocurrency Crash: Coinbase Suffers Major Outage, Binance Halts Terra Luna Trading.

“We appear to be entering a recession after a 10+ year economic boom. A recession could lead to another crypto winter, and could last for an extended period,” Armstrong said. “In past crypto winters, trading revenue (our largest revenue source) has declined significantly. While it is hard to predict the economy or the markets, we always plan for the worst so we can operate the business through any environment,” he added.

Coinbase CEO @brian_armstrong announced today the difficult decision to reduce the size of the Coinbase team by 18%. More details and rationale in Brian’s email to employees, which has been made public for all to see ➡️ https://t.co/SpdZU3KdpS

— Coinbase (@coinbase) June 14, 2022

“At the time, we were in the early innings of the bull run and adoption of crypto products was exploding. There were new use cases enabled by crypto getting traction practically every week,” Armstrong said.

“We saw the opportunities but we needed to massively scale our team to be positioned to compete in a broad array of bets. It’s challenging to grow at just the right pace given the scale of our growth,” he added.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 15, 2022 10:12 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).