Coinbase has announced a 14 percent reduction in its staff on Tuesday, citing the acceleration in internal AI adoption. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, announced the layoffs on X saying that the exchange wishes to keep close to its startup foundation with AI now in its core. Around 700 Coinbase employees are estimated to be afftected by this trimming.
The leadership at Coinbase is looking to rebuild the company as an intelligence ecosystem with smaller teams of humans aligning AI with day-to-day workings. As part of its restructuring roadmap moving on, Coinbase expects to retain a maximum of five layers of human teams after its high-profile C-suite leaders.
“AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated,” Armstrong said. “This has led us to an inflection point. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native.”
Cost cutting is among key reasons driving Coinbase to delegate more of its internal work to AI instead of having to pay and maintain human teams. The company has also observed that AI-based work flows are quicker, smoother, and more efficient compared to traditional human-dominated corporate functions, which carry margin for errors.
Ahead of its upcoming Q1 2026 results, Armstrong claimed that the company is well capitalized and maintains a diversified revenue streams. Market analysts expect the company to report a 26 percent YoY decrease in revenue to clock $1.5 billion between January and March this year.
Armstrong did, however, acknowledge that Coinbase’s business is volatile quarter to quarter. This could be because the trajectory of the crypto industry is highly dependent on regulatory, macro-economic, and geo-political developments. Even minute disbalances in these factors has repeatedly thrown the markets off-balance, leading to investor exodus towards safer assets.
Justifying the layoffs, Coinbase said, “we’re currently in a down market and need 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 has already revoked the system access for all of the terminated staff members with immediate effect, citing it as a user data protection measure. The laid off employees of the exchange will be compensated with support packages, Armstrong noted.
Jesse Pollock, the creater of Coinbase’s Base blockchain also said that AI’s role in the company is only going to grow.
The exchange has been infusing more AI usage internally at least for a year now. In 2025, Armstrong had said that employees who were lacking AI skills and were reluctant to get the required training were being fired from the company.
In March this year, Armstrong had claimed that 50 percent of the coding requirements at Coinbase has already been designated to AI.
Earlier in February, Coinbase released its results for the fourth quarter of 2025. With six percent drop in its quarter-over-quarter revenue, the exchange had roped-in $1.8 billion in revenue between October and December last year.