Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong pushes AI-first overhaul, fires 700 people

Coinbase (COIN) is cutting about 700 workers, equal to roughly 14% of its global staff, as CEO Brian Armstrong rebuilds the crypto exchange around AI, lower costs, and smaller teams.

The company expects most job cuts to be completed in the second quarter of 2026. Coinbase also expects to book about $50 million to $60 million in charges, mainly tied to severance and employee benefits.

The exchange warned that the final bill could rise if other restructuring costs appear. Its shares fell 3% in after-hours trading after the announcement, so the market did not exactly throw confetti.

Brian Armstrong cuts Coinbase staff as weak trading pushes the exchange into a leaner AI setup

Brian said Coinbase remains well funded for long-term growth, but the company still has to cut down its operating size while the market stays weak. His blog post tied the plan to the next crypto cycle, meaning the exchange wants fewer layers before trading activity comes back.

That is the kind of language companies use when they want to say the business is fine, but the payroll is too heavy for the present market.

The layoff package gives affected U.S. workers at least 16 weeks of base pay. They will also get two extra weeks of pay for every year they worked at the company, their next equity vesting, and six months of healthcare coverage.

Coinbase has gone through earlier job cuts during crypto downturns because the business is still tied closely to trading fees and investor appetite.

Brian also pointed to new AI tools that now help non-engineering teams write code and automate jobs that once needed more people. He then said:

Over the past 13 years, we have weathered four crypto winters, gone public, and built the most trusted platform in our industry. We’ve made it this far by making hard decisions and by always staying focused on our mission. This time will be no different – nothing has changed about the long term outlook of our company or industry.

Yoni Assia says eToro uses AI tools, as Coinbase also fights a whale lawsuit

The Coinbase cuts came up during an interview with eToro (ETOR) founder and CEO Yoni Assia on Monday, who was asked whether eToro had faced its own “Coinbase moment” after the exchange reduced staff because of crypto conditions.

Yoni answered that eToro made “a small, relatively minor adjustment” earlier this year. He framed the bigger issue as training workers and giving them access to AI tools.

Yoni said eToro uses Cursor, Groq, Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini from Alphabet (GOOGL), and Microsoft Copilot from Microsoft (MSFT). He also mentioned fresh deals with Groq, Cursor, and Anthropic.

Yoni then said that AI use inside eToro jumped by more than 1,000% in the last four months. He named November as a turning point, then mentioned Opus 4.5, GPT 5.5, and Groq 4.3 as tools that made AI more useful inside the company.

He also said eToro launched an App Store and released 40 new apps. Those apps were built by AI, tested by AI, and deployed by AI, while one person guided the idea and product goal. That is the same labor story now hitting Coinbase: fewer people, more automated work, and faster product output.

At the same time, Coinbase is dealing with a lawsuit from an anonymous crypto whale based in Puerto Rico. The user sued the exchange this week, claiming Coinbase has not released funds stolen in a 2024 hack. The case was filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco.

The filing hides key details, but it aligns with an August 2024 exploit in which one crypto user lost more than $55 million in DAI, an Ethereum stablecoin, after falling for a phishing scam. The whale says several on-chain investigation firms traced the stolen assets to a Coinbase account.

By early December 2024, the exchange had identified the funds and frozen them during an investigation, the lawsuit says.

The user now claims that about a year and a half later, the crypto still has not been returned. The complaint says Coinbase will not release the funds unless a court orders it.

The $55 million DAI theft was first flagged by pseudonymous on-chain sleuth ZachXBT. Hackers allegedly used Inferno Drainer to create a fake DeFi Saver login page for the victim.

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