Coinbase Slashes Its Workforce and Hands the Work to AI
Coinbase announced on Tuesday that it is cutting roughly 700 employees, equal to 14 percent of its entire workforce, as CEO Brian Armstrong declared that artificial intelligence has permanently changed the way the company needs to operate.
Armstrong broke the news in a post on X, framing the decision not simply as a cost-cutting move but as a full reimagining of how Coinbase works from the inside out. He described the vision as rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with human workers positioned around the edges to guide and oversee AI systems rather than carry out the work themselves.
It was one of the most direct statements any major tech CEO has made about what AI-driven restructuring actually looks like in practice. Two forces drove the decision. The first is the current slump in the crypto market, which has squeezed revenue across the industry.
The second, and more significant, is the speed at which AI is taking over tasks that entire teams once handled. Armstrong said he has watched AI allow small engineering teams to complete in days what previously took a full team weeks to build. With that kind of productivity leap, maintaining the same headcount no longer made sense.
The restructuring goes deeper than just removing jobs. Coinbase is eliminating what Armstrong calls pure managers, people who only oversee others, and replacing them with player-coaches who both lead their teams and do meaningful work themselves.
The company is also building AI-native pods, small units where a single person could direct a team of AI agents handling engineering, design, and product management all at once. Management layers above Armstrong himself will be capped at five.
Affected employees in the United States will receive at least 16 weeks of base pay, plus two additional weeks for every year they worked at the company. International workers will receive support based on local employment laws.
Coinbase is not alone. Block cut nearly half its workforce earlier this year, and Gemini, Pinterest, CrowdStrike, and Chegg have all made similar cuts, each pointing directly to AI reshaping their operations.
Armstrong insists this is not a retreat. He reaffirmed his belief in crypto’s future, pointing to stablecoins, tokenisation, and prediction markets as the next big drivers of growth. But for the 700 people walking out of Coinbase this week, the future already arrived, and it did not need them. #Coinbase Slashes Its Workforce and Hands the Work to AI#
