Today I made the difficult decision to reduce Coinbase's size by about 14%

Coinbase announced it will cut about 14% of its workforce and declared a transition to an 'AI-native' organization centered on AI technology. This decision aims to respond to the downturn in the crypto market while also optimizing for an environment where AI has rapidly increased work productivity.

The key organizational changes are as follows:

• Flattening the organization: To speed up decision-making, the organizational hierarchy will be reduced to a maximum of 5 levels below the CEO/COO.
• Hands-on leadership: Every leader must go beyond a managerial role to act as a 'Player-coach' and a strong Individual Contributor who directly does the work.
• AI-centered small teams: The organization will be built around talent who can efficiently leverage AI agents, experimenting with small AI-native pods such as 'one person teams' that combine the roles of engineer, designer, and PM.

Coinbase believes it is facing a huge inflection point in how work gets done, as AI dramatically accelerates engineers' work speed and enables non-technical teams to deploy code.