Coinbase employees lament "same pay, more work" after AI layoffs
Crypto exchange Coinbase, after a steady period of headcount growth, laid off 14% of staff earlier this week, attributing the cuts to a desire to become "AI-native." Employees reacting to the news anonymously aren't so enthused.
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CEO Brian Armstrong published an email written to staff about the layoffs on Twitter. He said that Coinbase is eliminating "pure managers" and reducing the layers in its organizational structure. It also plans to implement "one person teams" where people perform engineering, design and product management duties.
Coinbase employees on jobs forum Blind said it's not the first time that Coinbase has tried to get rid of pure-management roles; one verified account said the exchange pushed it a "couple [of] years ago too, and it didn't really pan out." Another said that the reality of these changes is that surviving employees will have the "same pay [but] work more!"
'Same pay' isn't necessarily a bad thing, as Coinbase staff are some of the highest earners in fintech. Coinbase staff earned $374k per head in total compensation last year, despite it making a $667m loss in Q4 of 2025. This was down from an average of $477k in 2024.
Coinbase offered 16-weeks pay to affected staff, with additional pay for longer-serving employees. Multiple employees lamented not being among those laid off, one of whom was hoping for "that sweet release." One employee said "40% of my team was fired and we were all hired within the last year or so."
This is one in a long line of sweeping changes made by Coinbase over the last few years. At the start of last year, it implemented new guidelines that stated a project should have a maximum of one bug for each developer working on it. Those in one-person teams, therefore, must ensure their project has no more than one bug.
Coinbase has also been mandating that staff adopt AI tools. Armstrong said in a podcast last month that he demanded staff sign up to an AI tool or they'd have to explain to him personally why they had not. He said that one developer was fired after they did not use AI tools and did not explain why.
Other fintechs adopting AI aren't using it to justify layoffs. Stripe said in its 2026 developer keynote last week that over 1,000 pull requests (changes to a code-base) are written entirely by AI coding agents, which Stripe calls "minions." It said that, in March, there were an average of 14,250 minion-assisted pull requests per week; Stripe didn't say how many pull requests were made in total, but in 2024 the average was 8,015 per week.
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