After recently cutting down its workforce, Coinbase’s senior exec has hinted that there might be further staff reduction if the large-scale sell-off in the crypto market deteriorates, Financial Times reported. Faryar Shirzad, the company’s chief policy officer told FT
“You never say never. The only commitment we can make is that we are going to operate the company responsibly and for the long haul and if that requires additional action, we will take that”.
He however added, “We don’t anticipate it at this time.”
The platform grabbed headlines ever since it decided to lay off 18% of its employees, nearly a fifth of its workforce. Brian Armstrong, the company’s CEO, wrote to employees then saying the “difficult decision” was taken to ensure stability during the market downturn.
In 2022, the firm which touts itself US largest cryptocurrency exchange has struggled to retain consumers amidst the market volatility. The platform revealed in May that it had lost $430 million in the first quarter due to a steep decline in trading fees.
The exchange’s number of transactional users too plummeted, and the firm predicted that trading volumes and users will fall again in the second quarter.
“Coinbase Is Operating In A Very, Very Tough Environment”
Shirzad said Coinbase was operating in a “very, very tough environment. “The company did what it needed to do decisively to be able to build for the long haul”, he added.
On the other hand, many of those fired employees complained that they were not notified before and only knew when their system’s access was cut off while some of them found support in the crypto community in getting job leads.
Meanwhile, Kraken has recently announced over 500 open positions for this year calling Bear markets the best for recruiting talent. Crypto giant Binance also intends to fill 2000 new hiring positions worldwide, according to the firm’s CEO Changpeng Zhao.
In a more worrisome development for the trading platform, a class-action suit was filed against Coinbase on 16th June alleging the firm misrepresented TerraUSD’s risk as an algorithmic stablecoin and that it failed to disclose its financial relationship with Terraform Labs.