Crypto exchanges Coinbase and BlockFi lay off hundreds of staff

theguardian.com:

Crypto exchanges Coinbase and BlockFi are laying off hundreds of staff members, equivalent to a fifth of their workforces, as they struggle to survive the second wave of the ongoing crypto crash.

Employees at Coinbase, once the flagship US cryptocurrency exchange, will learn whether they have lost their jobs in an email today. Those who have been laid off will be notified on their personal email account, the chief executive, Brian Armstrong, said, because their access to company systems will be terminated immediately.

“I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected, and this is not the experience I wanted for you,” Armstrong said in a letter to staff. “I want to say thank you for giving everything to this company, and that I am sorry. I hope that as we grow again we get a chance to hire you back. We would not be where we are today without your hard work and dedication to our mission. I am incredibly grateful for everything you have done to contribute to our success.”

Cryptocurrencies are an alternative way of making payments to cash or credit cards. The technology behind it allows the ‘money’ to be sent directly to others without it having to pass through the banking system. For that reason they are outside the control of governments and are unregulated by financial watchdogs – and transactions can be made in a way that keeps you reasonably pseudonymous.

If you own a crypto-asset you control a secret digital key that you can use to prove to anyone on the network that a certain amount of that asset is yours. If you spend it, you tell the entire network that you have transferred ownership of it, and use the same key to prove that you are telling the truth. Over time, the history of all those transactions