Coinbase Cut 700 Jobs and Pointed to AI. Six Weeks Later It's Hiring Again.

By AltIndex Research · 8 min read · June 20, 8:44 am

Coinbase cut roughly 700 jobs in early May and tied it to AI. Six weeks later the hiring is back, with around 150 open roles. Most of them are not AI jobs, which says something about how easily AI actually replaces headcount.

For the past several months, company after company has cut staff and pointed to AI as the reason. Block eliminated nearly 40% of its workforce and named AI directly. Meta cut around 8,000 roles to offset its AI spending. Cloudflare let go of 20% of its staff, mostly in finance, legal, and audit, and called it the agentic AI era. The logic is that AI tools can now do work that used to take far more people. But across many of these companies, a second pattern follows: a few months later, they are quietly hiring again. Coinbase is the latest example, and the data is staggering.

After months of shrinking its job postings, the company announced layoffs of roughly 700 people in early May, about 14% of its workforce, and tied the decision to optimizing for the AI era. We covered it when it was announced, and the alternative data tracked it cleanly: Coinbase had around 175 open roles the week before the cuts, then fell to a handful within days and flatlined near zero for a month.

Then on June 9 the postings turned. Our LinkedIn job postings data climbed from 2 open roles to roughly 150 over the following days, with new listings added almost daily, back to where the company sat through April. What Coinbase is hiring for says a lot about how clean that AI-for-headcount trade actually was.

Rehiring the roles AI supposedly replaced

Coinbase framed the cuts as an AI move, not a retreat. In its regulatory filing, the company said the layoffs were meant to manage operating expenses in response to market conditions and to optimize operations for the AI era. CEO Brian Armstrong went further, saying Coinbase would have no pure managers and would cap its structure at five layers between executives and its remaining 4,300 staff. This was pitched as an upgrade, a leaner company built for the AI era.

If software had truly replaced those 700 jobs, the company would not be reopening 150 positions a month later. And the new postings are not AI roles. Most are in finance, accounting, compliance, audit, and risk. Several are manager-level roles, the exact layer Armstrong said he wanted to thin. Only a handful carry an AI label, including a Technical Program Manager for Knowledge Systems and a CX Intelligence AI role.

A layoff that bought nothing

If the layoff was meant to lift the stock, it did not. COIN popped about 4% in premarket the morning of the announcement, then gave it back, and kept sliding through the June rehiring. The stock trades around $163 as of June 20, down 14.7% over the past month and roughly 63% below its 52-week high of $444.65. Coinbase booked $50 million to $60 million in restructuring costs, almost all severance, for a cut that left no lasting mark on the share price.

Some of that pressure is the crypto market, not Coinbase. Bitcoin trades near $64,000, down 27.5% over six months, and Coinbase is a leveraged bet on it. The fundamentals carry the strain: Coinbase reported a loss of $1.49 per share for the first quarter of 2026 against an expected profit of about $0.29, swinging to a net loss after several profitable quarters. That is the backdrop the AI framing sat on top of. The cuts came during a bad stretch for crypto and for the stock, the moment companies trim regardless of AI, and the rehiring six weeks later is what gives the game away.

None of this undoes the cut. Reopening 150 postings is not 700 people back, and Coinbase is still leaner than it was in April. But a company that just thinned its workforce in the name of AI is, weeks later, advertising heavily for finance, compliance, and risk roles. If AI had genuinely absorbed that work, those listings would not be going up.

Bottom line

The layoff was sold as an AI story but the hiring data complicates it. Coinbase trimmed during a tough stretch for crypto and for its stock. Weeks later, its open positions are focused on the kind of work AI was supposed to absorb: finance, compliance, and risk.

That is the pattern worth watching across the companies leaning on the AI rationale. Block, Meta, Cloudflare, and now Coinbase all framed deep cuts on the promise of AI efficiency. What was sold as a leaner, smarter company starts to look like cost-cutting dressed up for investors.

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Disclosure: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. AltIndex aggregates publicly available alternative data signals. Past signal performance does not guarantee future results. Always do your own due diligence before making investment decisions.