Topic: [2018-10-29] Coinbase Downsizes More Than a Dozen People: Report (Read 183 times)

Retail as in buying and selling bitcoin rather than running an exchange. They've basically made themselves repulsive to clients for payment processing due to making them control their own seeds. Part of their passive aggressive battle against bitcoin I guess.

Retail sales have probably taken a big hit but they were never really that big to begin with as most people seem to be getting involved with bitcoin for its investment potential as opposed to being a useable currency, but people are obviously still buying and selling bitcoin. If they wasn't then bitcoin would be in serious trouble and wouldn't be worth much but it has been hovering around £5k for quite some time (give or take a few times it fell over the past couple of months but seems to have rebounded each time). I'm sure Coinbase is still making a lot of money, and I'm sure there'll be a fluffy of activity and new accounts if the value ever has another boom.

It doesn't matter how high your fees are if no one's actually buying or selling. Things must be very quiet for all businesses at the moment, even the biggest. Volumes are pretty piddling on exchanges. It must be the same for retail sales.

They probably actually had very few customer support reps to start with, or certainly not enough to meet demand so getting rid of more probably isn't going to do them any good on a customer satisfaction level. Most of their employees will be doing other things behind the scenes. Newbies to bitcoin would have been hit the worst if they were unsure of what to do and it's pretty alarming when you get zero response from support and their automatic verification tools don't work properly. Doesn't look good for bitcoin, especially if they lose money due to coinbase. I wonder how many people actually just have up and left their coins or cash languishing in their accounts.


If coinbase are losing money (or not making much) then they're doing something very, very wrong. The fees they make on both buys and sells are quite large. It's actually a rip off to buy from there but I only use it to sell.

Hiring capable people for crypto related businesses (especially for large corporations as Coinbase) is a very time consuming process. By the time they finally hired enough staff to be ready to handle the increase in use, it's no longer needed because the use is already going down again. Coinbase has the money, just not the will to utilize it properly, because their shareholders don't want to throw around with money left and right "unnecessarily".

Binance is the only exchange actually putting its capital to work by employing full time staff, which means that they can handle any sort of usage without much problems. In a presentation Binance CEO said that they scaled their operation to handle a 100x increase in use, and there is no reason to doubt that statement. No surprise they have grown that quickly; they do right what others do wrong.

You really have the point and I do think the same way.Even we do saw that big numbers is quite dead already which they can possibly be active- no one knows which it does really need to have that readiness
in case of that situation.Firing 15 people would really be just less if they have can put up 200 on support department.They might cutting their expenses (which is impossible for now) or they do have another plans in mind.I got used to make use of Coinbase wallet and didn't experience issue for me to make comment about their support system but basing on what hilarious said then its really questionable if their support does really work?

They probably hired people based on a zero hours contract. So they can have more staff during the busy bull runs and cut the numbers when he work dries up

Knowing how information never fails to be distorted in cryptoland, this is probably something totally innocuous framed as the end of the world. But how companies like this cope with dead stretches fascinates me. They must be making peanuts and there's a lot of expenses flying out the door. Who knows how long this dead period will last?

That said they've just raised $300 million - https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-raises-series-e-round-of-financing-to-accelerate-the-adoption-of-cryptocurrencies-1ad927463814

Probably it 's not. Coinbase has around 500 employees currently. How many of them, do you think, work in the Customer Service department? I think it can be maybe 200 people or maybe even less. Coinbase has 13,300,000 users and although most of them are not active today, they can become active at any moment. So, if they are not going to replace those 15 with 150 newly hired, this decision looks very strange to me, especially if considering what hilariousetc wrote about their Customer Service  above.

Coinbase-the largest cryptocurrency exchange (USA )
15 dismissed employees is a trifle
The number accounts for 25 million, 600,000 users are active!!!
For the IV quarter of 2018 - up to 450 million dollars!
The exchange is estimated at $8 billion !
The Board of Directors includes Chris Dodds, who is also a member of the Board of Directors at Charles Schwab.
So it's very serious and begins a great game, we obviously have something to expect

I probably did sign up sometime in 2017 and had problems onwards, but I mailed their Customer Service a few months ago or so and never got a response at all either (though it wasn't a huge issue but to not get a response at all is unusual and quite unprofessional for a big company. If there were better options for me I would have abandoned the service long ago though). You may have a point about remoter workers. That was the position I applied for but I don't see them on their careers page anymore. Not sure why they'd get rid of them first though as there's benefits to them and are probably cheaper to hire or emply than office-based ones, but if they're more like third party self-employed contractors (like I am) it's easier to get rid of them without payouts and running into other legalities etc (depending on what sort of contract they're given if any. Most are just classed as 'temp' employees so can be made redundant at anytime for any reason).

When did you experience those problems, though? It's not 2017 anymore. The market's been pretty dead, as evidenced by trading volumes. I'm guessing there are less new customers signing up these days and less work volume across the board.

Still, I'm getting conflicted messages here. As of a month ago, they had reportedly doubled their staff over the course of seven months. Apparently these firings were of remote workers. They're probably just reorganizing internal structure and not actually downsizing.

lolwut? Not sure why they're firing people because they should be hiring if anything, especially in their Customer Service department. I even applied for a position that was advertised on their site under the 'careers' department but didn't hear anything back (which isn't surprising). I use Coinbase regularly as I like how swift it is to sell coins, but getting set up and my bank verified took ages and I didn't get any replies from their support for many months. They didn't reply at all to my first few messages and my money was stuck there because I couldn't withdraw even though I'd verified my account but their auto-approval system just didn't work and customer support wouldn't reply.

They're still looking for plenty of positions it seems: https://www.coinbase.com/careers

According to Yahoo! Finance, Coinbase has eliminated more than 15 people from its customer support, compliance, and fraud departments.

All three of these departments would seem to be of the utmost importance to the company, often simultaneously lauded and maligned for its commitment to regulatory compliance. Daniel Roberts, an author of the Yahoo! report, acquired confirmation that there had been firings but could not get an exact count from Coinbase. The number comes from an anonymous source, so could be more or less, but one thing is for certain: Coinbase definitely downsized more than a handful of people.


Move Comes At A Time of Expansion
Coinbase made no mention of the downsizing on its blog, and according to Roberts’ source, higher-ups at the firm are “handling communications poorly.” From our perspective, this news is somewhat odd, given that the company has recently appeared in good health and just this past week expanded its offerings for its institutional clients. Of course, financial health is not the only reason for positions to be eliminated.

The report notes that most of the employees were remote workers. As it turns out, Coinbase would prefer to bring customer service and the other departments, as a whole, closer to home. Coinbase told Yahoo!:

    We’ve learned that certain teams who are co-located are more efficient, effective, and happier in their roles. So moving forward, some teams—including Support, Fraud, and Compliance—will only hire employees into Coinbase offices.

Trading Down When The Market Is Down
Cryptocurrencies have been on a downward slope for most of 2018, from the highs at the end of 2017 and the beginning of the year. Smart cryptocurrency people tend to “hodl” when prices are low, and so trading volume at Coinbase and across the market has seen a concurrent decline with perceived value of cryptos.

According to the report, Coinbase layoffs have been expected by people at the company for some time now. It therefore makes good sense that remote employees in departments the company would prefer to have tighter control over would be the first to go.

Some experts predict an upswing in the value of Bitcoin impending. If this comes to pass, most other cryptocurrencies will inherently trade at higher prices, even if their Bitcoin value is steady or only slightly inclined.


Source: https://www.ccn.com/coinbase-downsizes-more-than-a-dozen-people-report/