Coinbase Lays-off 8% of Staff in India Following Recent Market Turmoil

• The company had intended to recruit over 1,000 people in India in 2022.
• Armstrong had blamed “informal pressure” from the central bank for suspending its UPI.

Coinbase, based in the United States, has reduced its Indian employment by 8% after initially announcing plans to triple its Indian personnel. According to Pankaj Gupta, vice president of engineering at the biggest US crypto exchange, which began offering exchange services in India in April, the company has laid off 8% of its workforce.

Brian Armstrong, the company’s CEO and co-founder said on June 14 that 18 percent of its workforce will be let off “to ensure we stay healthy during this economic downturn.”

Company Looking to Fill Top Positions

More than 400 full-time workers work at Coinbase’s Indian center, which opened its doors last year. The company had intended to recruit over 1,000 people in India in 2022. Many people are being let off, yet the company is looking to fill top positions. In order to restart Coinbase’s activities in India, it has hired Arnab Kumar, a former Prosus Ventures and Niti Aayog official.

Before his departure in November 2021, Kumar worked as Prosus’ India Director of Fintech Strategy. Kumar served as the program director for frontier technologies at Niti Aayog. Within days of its launch, Coinbase’s activities were shut down by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which said that it was “not aware of any crypto exchange using UPI.”

Armstrong blamed “informal pressure” from the central bank for suspending its UPI payment system as part of its earnings conference. Inflation, increasing interest rates, and the conflict in Ukraine have jeopardized the global economy, and worries are growing that several major countries may be on the verge of a recession.

Markets throughout the globe have fallen as a result of these concerns. Experts predict that the current downturn will last for some time in the crypto markets.