Coinbase announces fresh job cuts

Crypto exchange Coinbase has announced another round of jobs cuts, its second this year, as the value of cryptocurrencies plummet to a new low.  

Coinbase is planning to cut over 60 jobs in its recruitment and institutional onboarding teams, reported Reuters. A company  spokesperson said that the job cuts will help the crypto exchange operate as more efficiently, as per the report.  

Coinbase reported net loss of $544.6 million in the September quarter.  

In the first round of layoffs, announced in June, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong had said in a blog post that his company will cut its workforce by 18% (impacting around 1100 jobs), months after declaring that it will hire 2,000 people in product and engineering in 2022.  

The collapse of FTX, world’s second biggest crypto exchange valued at $32 billion early this year, has put the fledgling industry under stress once again.  

Early this week, value of Bitcoin dropped to a new low of $16,000 since November 2020, according to Coin Metrics.   

The crypto industry has been going through its most difficult phase this year and has not fully recovered from the market wide crash triggered by the collapse of stablecoins TerraUSD (UST) and LUNA. UST’s value fell by 82.19% to $0.6, while LUNA saw its price drop by 99% from $120 to $0.02 in May. Its ripple effect was felt throughout the crypto industry, which lost close to $800 billion in market value in a month, according to CoinMarketCap.  

In India, trading volume also plummeted after the government levied 30% tax on virtual digital assets from April.  

Crypto companies in India too announced jobs cuts. In October, Indian crypto exchange WazirX reportedly laid off 40% of its workforce (around 70 employees), according to a report by Coindesk, a crypto news website.