Bitcoin news – live: Crypto exchange Coinbase sacks staff amid price collapse

As well as Coinbase, BlockFi CEO Zac Prince has that the company will be “reducing [its] headcount by roughly 20 per cent”.

Crypto.com also announced that was laying off 260 employees.

“In the medium term, everyone is really bracing for more downside,” said Mikkel Morch, executive director of crypto hedge fund ARK36, told CNBC.

“Bear markets have a way of exposing previously hidden weaknesses and overleveraged projects so it is possible that we see events like last month’s unwinding of the Terra ecosystem repeat.”

Monsur Hussain, senior director of financial institutions at Fitch Ratings, also told the publication that the liquidation of Celsius’ assets would “further rock the valuation of cryptoassets, leading to a wider round of contagion within the crypto sphere.”

Last month, Coinbase warned users that their cryptocurrency could be at risk if the exchange ever went bankrupt.

“Because custodially held crypto assets may be considered to be the property of a bankruptcy estate, in the event of a bankruptcy, the crypto assets we hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings and such customers could be treated as our general unsecured creditors”, the warning states.

According to reports, Coinbase has roughly 5,000 full-time workers, translating to around 1,100 people who will lose their jobs.

Coinbase‘s Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, along with two other executives, netted about $1.2 billion in proceeds from selling stock.

They sold the shares at prices ranging from $189 to $422. Coinbase opened at $381 on April 14, 2021, its first day of trading. On Wednesday, the stock closed at $67.17, the Wall Street Journal reports.

This huge profit comes as Coinbase culls over 1,000 members of staff.

Crypto exchange Coinbase will sack 18 per cent of staff amid fears of an incoming “crypto winter”.

Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s chief executive and co-founder, said that he admitted the company had grown too quickly and was to blame for at least some of its problems.

But it now faced a situation in which it had to sack a large proportion of its staff in order to keep the company secure through any future economic downturn, he said.

Coinbase employees were to receive emails from HR to tell them if their job was affected, he said. Those would be sent to their personal email addresses, since the people being sacked would immediately lose access to the company’s systems.