Coinbase is Either the Company of the Future, or Jumped a Massive Shark

There’s one line in Brian Armstrong’s email to Coinbase staff yesterday that everything else hangs off. ‘We are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.’[1] Sounds a little dystopian doesn’t it. Well, it is. And what’s interesting here is that this isn’t a reaction to an over-hiring splurge that Block went through after Covid, only to use AI as a reason to clip a huge, ballooned headcount. This is Coinbase. They’re already pretty lean, and now they’re getting even leaner. The biggest U.S. crypto exchange, the one most retail investors trust with their Bitcoin, has just told the world it is no longer a company in the traditional sense. It is being rebuilt as an intelligence. The humans are now the alignment layer. About 700 staff are out. Roughly 14% of Coinbase. The press has framed it as another bear-market layoff round, and Q1 earnings hit tomorrow, and they’re going to be ugly. The earnings story is the cover. The operating model replacing them is the news. Armstrong was direct about what comes next. Five layers maximum below the CEO and COO. Leaders running 15-plus direct reports. No ‘pure’ managers, every leader has to be a player-coach. AI-native ‘pods.’ Experimental ‘one-person teams’ where a single human covers engineering, design, and product at once. And this… ‘non-technical teams are now shipping production code.’ The memes and comments around this are pretty funny. One of my favorites, ‘I used to be in charge of freezing Coinbase accounts for no reason. I just got fired so AI can now do it.’ Headcount axing is becoming endemic in the crypto world. Crypto.com cut 12% in March. Gemini is shedding 200 roles (along with pulling out of multiple regions). Block trimmed 40% (albeit that was off the back of an insane hiring spree in the preceding six years). But these exchanges aren’t getting smaller because they’re dying (Gemini might be to be fair), but the bulk of them are getting smaller because the work is being done by something, not someone, else. Here’s where the OG in me has to argue against my own twitch. Armstrong has been pushing on the AI idea for a while now. AI agents can’t open bank accounts but can own crypto wallets. Coinbase’s Agentic Wallets, built on the x402 protocol, have pushed past 50 million machine-to-machine transactions[2]. Binance has its own agentic wallet[3]. Ethereum’s ERC-8004 gives agents on-chain identity[4]. And until yesterday, that was an idea all about external customers. The idea of future AI agents using crypto rails because banks couldn’t serve them… Apple just enabled Starlink satellite support to T-Mobile iPhones. One of the biggest potential winners from global satellite coverage? Just about everything Elon touches turns to gold: • SpaceX projected IPO at $1.75T • Tesla up by over 30,000% since IPO • And now - iPhone’s get satellite access But while Wall Street focuses on Apple, Mode Mobile is quietly positioned to capitalize on this global satellite revolution. Their EarnPhone technology already: • Reaches 490M+ users worldwide • Helped those users save and earn over $1 billion • Grew revenue 32,481% And that was before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating “dead zones,” Mode’s earning technology can reach 3B+ unbanked people globally in rural populations worldwide. We’re talking about emerging markets with no infrastructure. Right now, you can still invest at $0.50/share. Over 59,000 shareholders have already claimed their shares and they’ve just secured the $MODE ticker from Nasdaq. The time to invest is now, before any potential IPO.* Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.50/share and get up to 20% bonus! Now Armstrong is applying the same future vision internally. Coinbase itself is being rebuilt around fleets of AI agents managed by a thin human layer. There are two implications to this… The bullish one. If the largest regulated U.S. exchange can credibly run this way, every other financial institution will be forced to follow. Software as an economic agent stops being a 2030 prediction and becomes the 2026/27 default. Crypto integrates AI in a way and at a speed that blows the market away and sends AI-related crypto to the moon (we’re already getting a bit of a glimpse of that). The crypto x AI trade becomes the hottest trade for the next cycle, and the catalyst of the next super FOMO cycle. The bearish one. As humans get squeezed out of the workflow, we do end up where a lot of people end up without work, without income, and roll the dice in degen markets just to try and make ends meet. And then the AI takes control over large parts of crypto infrastructure in not a very nice way. Last week, an attacker drained Grok’s wallet using instructions encoded in Morse code[5]. Admittedly, that was a toy. But the same vulnerability inside an exchange’s automated workflows would not be. Armstrong has put a marker down. Maybe this is the norm for organizations, particularly crypto ones, going forward. Or it’s the greatest case of jumping the shark that we’ve ever seen. Trust in crypto, Adam Atlantic [1] [3] https://www.panewslab.com/en/articles/019df36f-3242-74ad-8b36-02d6eb0db87e [4] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8004 *Disclaimer: Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur. The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period. Tesla return calculated based on Yahoo Finance adjusted stock price data from June 29, 2010 to January 31, 2025.