Coinbase To Lay Off 8% Of India Team — But Makes This Key Top-Level Hire

Coinbase Inc COIN, which curtailed its Indian operations within three days of opening, has now laid off nearly 8% of its workforce in the country as part of its global cost-cutting strategy.

What Happened: Coinbase, when it forayed into Indian markets, came with an ambitious plan of more than tripling its workforce. However, the recent blood bath in the Cryptocurrency market and India's unsupportive environment for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin BTC/USD, Ethereum ETH/USD, and Dogecoin DOGE/USD has left the company in the doldrums.

After the Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the company would be laying off about 18% or 1,100 of its employees amid worsening macroeconomic conditions — its vice president of engineering, Pankaj Gupta, took to Twitter to share that approx 8% of the Indian workforce will be affected by the layoffs.

Quoting Armstrong's tweet, Gupta wrote, "due to ongoing macroeconomic conditions, we made the difficult decision to reduce 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."

Gupta added that despite the current hostile environment for crypto exchanges, India would continue to remain among Coinbase's 'top market priorities' where it will continue investing in product and engineering teams.

Despite the mass layoffs, the company is still focused on India and has brought in Arnab Kumar as director of India Market Expansion. Kumar — who has previously worked at the policy think tank of the Government of India Niti Ayog — was India's director of strategy and fintech at Prosus before joining Coinbase.

Price Action: According to data from Benzinga Pro, Coinbase shares were trading 3.14% lower in the pre-market session on Thursday.