Coinbase lays off 18 percent of its employees, CEO Brian Armstrong says the exchange 'over-hired' in 2021

moneycontrol.com:

As the crypto crash gets worse with Bitcoin at around $21,900, the world's third-largest cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said on June 14 that the company will lay off 18 percent of its employees.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong made the announcement on a blog after the company made multiple changes to its hiring strategy over the past two months, saying that the company 'over-hired' when it was growing.

"Today I am making the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team by about 18%, to ensure we stay healthy during this economic downturn....but first I want to start by taking accountability for how we got here. I am the CEO, and the buck stops with me," Armstrong's blog read.

The CEO blamed the current recession and the possibility of the crypto winter lasting long as reasons for this decision.

Armstrong also said that the company which had 1,250 employees in 2021 'grew too quickly'.

"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. We saw the opportunities but we needed to massively scale our team to be positioned to compete in a broad array of bets."