The largest digital currency exchange in the world is Coinbase and a handful of remote customer support staff have been cut this week.
This was confirmed by Coinbase but they didn’t specify how many employees they let go but according to rumours, there were around 15 people that lost their job.
The company has over 500 workers and so this number might not seem like a big impact but when you look at the fact Coinbase was preparing to go public then this is an interesting time to let people go. A large amount of funding came in this month and now the exchange has a value of $8 billion.
The workers that were let go were part of a team that which Coinbase announced in a blog post back in 2013:
“We recently hit 300,000 users on Coinbase… it’s become evident that in order to build the best customer service for our Coinbase customers we need to scour the world to find the best. As a result, we’re building a remote customer support team to accommodate our growing user base.”
Looking at the current state of things, Coinbase has said that there is more than 25 million users on its platform and has offices all over the world including London, Tokyo, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Portland and more. In January this year, the exchange took on a former Salesforce and Twitter executive, Tina Bhatnagar in order to look over customer service. Bhatnagar aims for customer service staff centralised in Coinbase’s offices, as a result of this, the remote support team members lost their jobs although some of them were apparently given the opportunity to relocate to a Coinbase office.
The move also speaks to market demand. At the end of last year, the market surged and companies seemed to take on hundreds of staff to keep up with the chaos of what was happening to the space. During this time, Coinbase took on around 50,000 on a daily basis and further built on its decentralised customer support team.
This year is different as on average, most digital currencies are seeing a red and Bitcoin is down over 60% this year alone.
For a few months now there have been rumours of layoffs from Coinbase, so maybe this is something that we could have expected?
What are your thoughts? Let us know what you think down below in the comments!
