Brian Armstrong walked into Tuesday with a decision already made. By the time markets opened, 700 Coinbase employees were out.
No crisis. No scandal. Just a CEO who looked at what artificial intelligence could do and decided his headcount was too high.
The cuts represent 14% of the company's total workforce. Coinbase expects to pay out between $50 million and $60 million in severance. US staff leave with a minimum of 16 weeks base pay, plus two weeks for every year served.
Armstrong published his internal memo publicly. He didn't dress it up.
"Engineers are shipping in days what used to take entire teams weeks," he wrote. "We need to return to the speed of a startup, with AI at our core."
The restructuring goes deep. Management layers are being stripped to five levels below the CEO. Coinbase is piloting one-person teams a single employee handling engineering, design, and product simultaneously, with AI doing the rest.
This is not a company in trouble cutting costs to survive.
This is a company betting that fewer humans and more AI wins the next phase of crypto. Stablecoins, tokenisation, institutional adoption Armstrong still believes the opportunity is enormous.
He just believes he needs far fewer people to chase it.
Earnings drop Thursday. The market will have its verdict shortly after.
Seven hundred people won't be around to see it.
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