Coinbase sacks 8% of India team; UpGrad bags $225 million, bucks edtech trend

When it launched in India with much fanfare two months ago, US crypto exchange Coinbase said it planned to triple its workforce in the country. Instead, it has now laid off about 8% of its employees in India, or about one in 12. It isn’t surprising when you consider Coinbase’s share price is down an eye-popping 80% since the start of the year, making bitcoin’s 54% drop look like a minor blip.

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Coinbase sacks 8% of India workers after vowing to triple team

Coinbase, the largest US crypto exchange, has sacked about 8% of its India workforce just two months after announcing plans to triple its team in the country.

Driving the news: Pankaj Gupta, the company’s vice president of engineering, said on Twitter on Wednesday, “Due to ongoing macroeconomic conditions, we made the difficult decision to reduce around 18% of Coinbase’s global workforce. Although this did impact our India hub, the cuts were much lower than the global average. Approximately 8% of our India team was unfortunately affected.”

CEO Brian Armstrong had said that the company was laying off 18% (about 1,100) of its employees on Tuesday.

Coinbase is one of the companies hit hardest by the recent market downturn – its stock is down almost 80% since the start of 2022.

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