Coinbase slows hiring after the crypto market crash

Coinbase president and chief operating officer Emilie Choi said that the crypto exchange is slowing hiring temporarily to reassess the hiring requirements after the recent crash which wiped billions of dollars in market value to the crypto industry.  

“To ensure we’re best positioned to succeed during and after the current market downturn, we’re announcing we’re slowing hiring so we can reprioritise our hiring needs against our highest-priority business goals,” Choi said in a blog post.  

Choi assured this will not have any impact on the company’s expense outlook for Q2 or the entire 2022. “We’re in a strong position. We have a solid balance sheet and we’ve been through several market downturns before, and we’ve emerged stronger every time,” she added. 

Coinbase chief executive Bryan Armstrong had said in April that his company will triple the headcount and hire over 1,000 people this year in India, where it opened trading services last month. Coinbase currently has over 300 employees in India, working at its tech hub in Bengaluru that was opened last year.

However, days after starting trading services in India, Coinbase had to shut down transactions via a Unified Payment Interface (UPI) due to regulatory reasons. During an earnings call this month, Armstrong said that his company had to disable UPI payments due to informal pressure from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).  

Choi also urged her employees to look at the bigger picture. She said, this is a confusing time and that market downturns can feel scary. “But as we said at last week’s Town Hall, we plan for all market scenarios, and now we are starting to put some of those plans into practice.” 

During the recent crash in the crypto market, the value of Bitcoin fell under $30,000 for the first time in 10 months. According to CoinMarketCap, the crypto industry lost close to $800 billion in market value in a month.  

The most alarming was the crash 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. 

Even before the market crash which saw the value of some of the stablecoins crash to zero crypto exchanges in India reported a decline in trading volumes soon after the 30% tax regime on virtual digital assets (VDA) came into effect in April. Within a few days transaction volume on exchanges had dropped by 30% to 50%, according to CREBACO (Credit Rating for Exchanges, Blockchains and Coin Offerings).