Breaking! Coinbase lays off 14% of staff late at night, CEO says AI will replace you and me? 700 people laid off, how deep is the crypto winter?

The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, Coinbase, disclosed a regulatory document on Tuesday (May 5th), which clearly states: the company has decided to lay off about 14% of its employees, involving approximately 700 people.

With a total team size of nearly 5,000, this move means more than one-seventh of the staff will leave. At the same time, the company expects to pay $50 million to $60 million in severance and related benefits.

CEO Brian Armstrong posted on social media, listing AI technology and the crypto market bear market as two main reasons. He said, “AI is bringing profound changes to how businesses operate, and we are reshaping Coinbase to lead this new era.”

He then added— the company “is currently in a bear market and needs to immediately adjust its cost structure.” In plain language, this means: money is hard to make, and slimming down is necessary.

Coinbase is not an isolated case. In February, fintech company Block laid off about 40% of its staff, around 4,000 people, citing rapid iteration of AI. Last month, Meta announced a reduction of about 10% of its employees (around 8,000 people), and also shut down 6,000 open positions, while simultaneously heavily investing in AI research and development.

Microsoft has also been active, offering early retirement plans to many long-term employees last month, aligned with major investments in AI. Analysts point out that although various industries are discussing how AI will change work, the industry undergoing the most profound disruption is actually the tech sector itself.

In his statement, Brian Armstrong outlined the future organizational structure: smaller teams, with members responsible for managing AI agents (digital bots) capable of handling programming tasks. Human managers will also need to “work closely with the team.”

He described the current moment as a “turning point,” indicating that the biggest risk is inaction. The company is “proactively and consciously adjusting, rebuilding Coinbase into a lean, fast, AI-native enterprise.” Future architecture will reduce management layers under the CEO and COO, improving decision-making efficiency.

This aligns closely with the logic of many recent tech giants— the rapid advancement of AI tools in code generation is directly impacting the core group of software engineers.

This restructuring at Coinbase reflects dual pressures: on one hand, the evolution of AI technology forces management to proactively change; on the other hand, the cyclical fluctuations of the cryptocurrency market directly impact the company’s revenue. The company has already made it clear that its income heavily depends on crypto asset prices and platform trading volume, and profitability is under significant pressure during market downturns.

Armstrong characterized this layoff as a proactive move rather than a passive response, emphasizing that it is leveraging the market downturn to streamline the organization and prepare for the next cycle.

It sounds very rational, but 700 real people are just gone. The AI layoffs in Silicon Valley are spreading from large tech companies to the crypto space.

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