🙅♀️ Coinbase freezes hiring and withdraws job offers
Coinbase freezes hiring, Gemini lays off 10% of workforce, Tesla to cut staff by 10%
gm degens 🥱
Life has not been fair with us lately. Don’t get me wrong, red is not that bad as a color but I feel like we have been wearing the same red for a very long time now. But, hey..it is Friday so that evens out the pain.
Today’s newsletter covers mostly Coinbase hiring freeze as well as other recent layoffs that have happened in the crypto space and overall tech sector.
🙅♀️ Coinbase freezes hiring and withdraws job offers
Coinbase went public back in April 2021. That day, Coinbase shares were trading at $381/share. It kept going up even more, eventually to settle at a price around $320. Based on this, Coinbase was worth almost $90 billion. 👨🎤
A huge deal. One of the biggest crypto exchanges on the market. They even made it to the Fortune 500 companies. They went public on perfectly timed manner. When markets were super hyped up. That explains the rush to go public ASAP. Now, a year has passed by. Let’s check those numbers again. Currently, it is trading at $73.82/share. Total market cap now is $16.4 billion, or almost $74 billion less since April 2021. A big fat 80% decrease of their market cap in less than a year.🧑🎤
We are already aware of the reasons on what it is causing this. Crypto market has been going down for a while now. At the time when Coinbase went for an IPO, BTC price was $63k, while today it is currently sitting at $29k, more than 50% loss of value. With that, hype is gone. Whether we like it or not, hype and FOMO plays a big role in crypto space. Crypto traders tend to trade mostly for speculative purposes, not because of the intrinsic value of a specific token.👩🎤
In bear markets, only those who are big believers of the web3 space and the opportunities that come with it, are the ones who keep building no matter what the price is.🧝♀️
Coinbase was on a hiring spree for a while. Everything was going well..until recently. Back in April, they said that they will slow down with hiring and then yesterday they came with an announcement saying that they will freeze hiring indefinitely (meaning, for a long time) and will rescind some of the accepted offers. 🧝♂️
TL;DR: In response to the current market conditions and ongoing business prioritization efforts, we will extend our hiring pause for both new and backfill roles for the foreseeable future and rescind a number of accepted offers. - By L.J Brock, Chief People Officer /
While current market conditions have a huge impact on this, I do believe that overall trust in Coinbase is lost as well. Hiring freeze makes sense considering that they are not in expansion mode. Of course, no one is happy about getting and offer, only later on to receive an email saying that we have rescinded that offer (I have been there once and I hope no one experiences it).
Also, overall experience with their product sucks. I even wrote a newsletter on why their recently launched NFT marketplace sucks. 🧟♀️
Of course, Coinbase is not the only company which somehow got exposure on the crypto space to hiring freeze. We have seen similar moves from other companies as well, including some layoffs.🧙♂️
Meta (Facebook) froze hiring early in May - According to their team, this freezing comes because of some unprecedented issues that have happened recently, such as “Russia's invasion of Ukraine; changes that Apple made to privacy settings on its iOS operating system last year; and a softer macroeconomic environment as factors that weakened Facebook's ability to rake in revenue.”
Gemini lays off 10% of their workforce - They stated that, “we have asked team leaders to ensure that they are focused only on products that are critical to our mission and assess whether their teams are right-sized for the current, turbulent market conditions that are likely to persist for some time. After much thought and consideration, we have made the difficult but necessary decision to part ways with approximately 10% of our workforce.”
Tesla to cut staff by 10% - Not long time after Elon announcing that everyone has to go back to office if they want to work for Tesla, the announcement about cutting their workforce by 10% came out. Although this is not a crypto company which might have a direct impact in the space, as we are aware, Elon is well known in the industry and his involvement with Doge and his offer to buy Twitter are somewhat important in the crypto market.
👩🏽🎓 Degens Vocabulary
This will be a daily section where we will keep you updated with the web3 space vocabulary (will be using them more often once audience gets more familiar with them).
REKT, - It is a word misspelled for ‘wrecked’. Heavily used among NFT traders when floor prices crash. 😵💫🗞️ Other news in the space
Crypto Just Had Its Lehman Moment. What’s Next?
Comptroller of the Currency Hsu: 'Growth in crypto is driven by hype'
Bear Market Could See Some Crypto Miners Turning to M&A for Survival
New York Senate passes moratorium on proof-of-work mining
