Coinbase Cuts 60 in Recruiting and Onboarding Teams

After making job cuts that totaled 18% of its full-time workforce in June, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has announced another 60 layoffs. 

These staff reductions are limited to the company’s recruiting and institutional onboarding teams, as the company has lower planned hiring needs and has completed its institutional onboarding backlog, Coinbase Director of Corporate & Global Communications Elliott Suthers said in a statement emailed to PYMNTS on Thursday (Nov. 10). 

“These are isolated and targeted actions by two teams to help Coinbase operate as efficiently as possible,” Suthers said in the statement. 

The move comes a week after Coinbase reported another brutal earnings miss in the third quarter of 2022, losing $545 million and missing earnings targets by a little and revenue by a lot. 

As PYMNTS reported Nov. 3, the Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange saw its revenue cut in half from the same quarter a year earlier. 

The “macro headwinds” of crypto winter and the overall state of the U.S. economy came up a lot during Coinbase’s Nov. 3 earnings call — and could worsen, Chief Financial Officer Alesia Haas said. 

The announcement of the job cuts also comes one day after Bloomberg reported that Robinhood and Coinbase were the two companies whose stock saw the greatest losses Wednesday (Nov. 9) after news of the turmoil around crypto exchange FTX. 

Coinbase’s shares dipped 9.5% to a record low Wednesday, while Robinhood’s dropped 14%. These were among many crypto-linked stocks that tumbled this week as investors were rattled by the news of FTX’s troubles, according to the report. 

Speaking of Coinbase’s job cuts in the Thursday statement, Suthers said: “Today was another difficult day — especially for our colleagues and friends who this directly impacts the most. We are offering generous severance packages for those affected, and we thank our team, current and former, for their understanding and resilience as we move through this difficult cycle.”