Billionaire CEO’s early morning email told staff he was sacking one in seven of them to make way for AI

A billionaire crypto boss told hundreds of workers they were being sacked in a blunt early morning email that warned artificial intelligence had changed work forever.

Brian Armstrong, co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, posted a copy of the message on social media at 6.55am on Tuesday morning. 

Armstrong wrote that the company would cut 14 percent of its workforce, affecting roughly 700 people, blaming AI and the pressing need to change the company’s culture. 

He said affected workers would receive more details by email within an hour, but Coinbase employees said their system access had already been restricted. 

‘I know this feels sudden and harsh,’ he wrote – adding that Coinbase had made the ‘difficult decision’ because of its ‘duty to protect customer information.’ 

While Armstrong insisted that the company was ‘well-capitalized’ and ‘positioned for ​long-term growth,’ he conceded that ‘market conditions’ required him to streamline operations so Coinbase could be ‘leaner and more efficient.’ 

He further justified the cuts as part of a broader restructuring at America’s largest crypto exchange, which needed to become ‘AI native’ after a volatile spell for digital currencies. 

Armstrong said he had watched engineers use AI to ‘ship in days what used to take a team weeks,’ while non-technical staff were now writing production code and other workflows were being automated. 

Coinbase is only the latest tech company to take a hatchet to its workforce and blame AI for the cuts.

Cloud computing giant and AI powerhouse Oracle cut around 30,000 jobs in March and April, with over 10,000 positions axed in a single morning.

Amazon has cut tens of thousands of corporate roles across multiple rounds in late 2025 and early 2026, to reduce bureaucracy.

Amazon CEO cited the need to ‘reduce layers’ so that his company could function ‘like the world’s largest startup.’

Just this month, Meta has begun another wave of cuts, laying off approximately 8,000 employees – 10 percent of its workforce – in a shift away from its failed metaverse play and towards massive investments in AI.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s payments company Block axed 40 percent of its workforce – also citing AI – while Atlassian has slashed around 10 percent to refocus on, you guessed it, AI. 

Armstrong said he wanted to ‘fundamentally’ change how his company worked, ‘rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence with humans around the edge.’

This required him to flatten its management structure, scrap ‘pure managers’ and push leaders to act more like ‘player-coaches’ who get their ‘hands dirty’ alongside their teams.

One of the first crypto exchanges, Coinbase was founded back in 2012 when Bitcoin was priced at just $6.

The company went public at the height of the pandemic craze for cryptocurrencies, when Bitcoin had risen thousands of percent to around $70,000.

Since then, the company’s fortunes have waxed and waned with the crypto market as a whole.

Its market value crashed 75 percent after the pandemic Bitcoin boom turned to a huge bust, then surged to all-time high as the original crypto rose to around $120,000 last year.

Since then, trading volumes have languished as Bitcoin entered the doldrums – and the tech industry’s fickle attention has turned to AI.