Coinbase is hiring and paying an average of $374k despite its huge loss
2025 wasn't the best year for Coinbase, mostly because it wasn't a good year for crypto. The exchange made a $667m loss last year, down from a $1.3bn profit in 2024. This didn't stop it from hiring.
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A 10-K form filed with the SEC last week by Coinbase said that the firm had 4,951 employees at the end of 2025, up from 3,772 at the end of 2024. As a result, Coinbase ended 2025 with its highest headcount since Q2 of 2022, just before it cut ~20% of staff. Coinbase was busiest with recruitment in in Q3 last year, when it hired 500 people. During that quarter, Bitcoin crashed, with more than $19bn in crypto leverage being liquidated on a single day in October. The following quarter, Coinbase was more measured, hiring only ~150 people. This was apparently a blip; Coinbase said in its shareholder letter that it expects headcount "to grow at a slightly higher rate than Q4."
Today, Coinbase has over 260 job openings, slightly down from the ~300 it had at the start of 2025. Desired recruits are predominantly in engineering, with backend jobs being most common.
As new faces proliferate, average pay at Coinbase has fallen. Average 'employee-related expenses' per head (including cash and stock compensation), fell from $477k in 2024 to $374k in 2025. Expenses were generally flat in its technology and development division, down in marketing, and up in its general/administrative arm.
In Coinbase's shareholder letter, the fintech said that most of the recent hires were "added in our customer support and product teams;" the fall in average pay suggests more of the former have been hired than the latter.
Nonetheless, Coinbase made some big hires, even after the Bitcoin crash. Liz Martin, a partner at Goldman Sachs, joined Coinbase in November as its head of product for derivatives and markets. Earlier in the year, Naveen Balraj, formerly of hedge fund Citadel and HFT firm Flow Traders, joined as a product manager when Coinbase acquired options marketplace Deribit for $2.9bn in August.
Despite markets slumping, banks are still showing interest in crypto. UBS promoted Saurav Banerjee, head of digital asset compliance, to MD this year. Morgan Stanley has been seen hiring engineers focused on blockchain and tokenization this year on salaries of up to $165k. Citi is hiring a CIO of digital assets in its wealth arm, although the listing was supposed to close in October 2025, suggesting that banks are struggling to hire.
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