Coinbase said Tuesday it will cut 14% of its workforce, a move that will affect about 700 staff as the crypto exchange reshapes itself for its next phase of growth. Chief Executive Brian Armstrong said the company needs to be “be leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth.”
Armstrong said in a Tuesday X post that the changes were being shared with staff the same day, and he tied the layoffs directly to the way AI is changing work inside the company. He said he had watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks, and said many of Coinbase's workflows are now automated.
Coinbase employed 4,951 people at the end of 2025, so the cuts will remove a meaningful slice of the company’s headcount. Armstrong said the pace of what is possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically and is accelerating every day, a message that puts AI at the center of the company’s restructuring rather than at the margins.
The layoffs also place Coinbase alongside Snap, Block and Atlassian, which have cited AI as a factor in job cuts this year. That keeps the company in a broader wave of corporate retrenchment in which automation is increasingly being used not just to speed up work, but to justify doing it with fewer people.
The immediate question is whether Coinbase can actually deliver the faster, leaner operation Armstrong promised without damaging the engineering capacity it says AI is helping to unlock. For now, the company is betting that the same technology trimming its roster will also help it move faster than the rivals trying to do the same.