Jeff Barron

This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase: Team, Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we're doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the future. Why now Two forces are converging at the same time. We need to be front footed to respond to both. First, the market. Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption, with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization, and more taking off. However, our business is still volatile from quarter to quarter. While we've managed through that cyclicality many times before and come out stronger on the other side, we’re currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth. Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day. All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company. The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core. What this means To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it. What does this mean in practice? - Fewer layers, faster decisions: We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO. Layers slow things down and create coordination tax. The future is small, high context teams that can move quickly. Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. Fewer layers also means a leaner cost structure that is built to perform through all market cycles. - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role. In short: AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era. This is a new way of working, and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs. To those who are affected I know there are real people behind these decisions — talented colleagues who have poured themselves into this company and our mission. To those of you who will be leaving: thank you. You’ve helped build Coinbase into what it is today, and I am sincerely grateful for everything you've done. All impacted team members will receive an email to their personal account in the next hour with more information, and an invitation to meet with an HRBP and a senior leader in your organization. Coinbase system access has been removed today. I know this feels sudden and harsh, but it is the only responsible choice given our duty to protect customer information. To those affected, we will be providing a comprehensive package to support you through this transition. US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA. Employees on a work visa will get extra transition support. Those outside of the US will receive similar support, based on local factors and subject to any consultation requirements. Coinbase prides itself on talent density. Our employees are among the most talented people in the world, and I have no doubt that your skills and experience will be highly sought after as you pursue your next chapters. How we move forward To the team that is staying, I know this is a difficult day. We’re saying goodbye to colleagues and friends you've been in the trenches with. But here’s what I want you to know as we move forward together: Over the past 13 years, we have weathered four crypto winters, gone public, and built the most trusted platform in our industry. We’ve made it this far by making hard decisions and by always staying focused on our mission. This time will be no different – nothing has changed about the long term outlook of our company or industry. And most importantly, our mission has never been more important for the world. Increasing economic freedom requires a new financial system, and we’re building it. The Coinbase that emerges from this will be more capable than ever to achieve our mission. Brian

CRITICAL: if you are running Mosaic 2.4 on a VAX/VMS system, please be aware of this RCE that GPT-5.4 just found and exploited!

AMD’s AI director Stella Laurenzo claims Anthropic’s Claude Code has significantly declined in quality since early March, citing analysis of 6,800+ sessions and 234k tool calls showing rising “laziness” behaviors like shallow reasoning, skipping code review, and incomplete tasks. Honestly, this is more impactful than expected, engineers report the model now favors quick, incorrect fixes over deep problem-solving, raising trust issues for complex workflows.

JUST IN: Claude Mythos is reportedly intelligent enough to “spot weaknesses in almost every computer on earth”

I will say it again, we used GPT5.4 and Opus, and we were able to autonomously find zero-days in the Linux Kernel (in the last 3 weeks) Mythos is probably better at the task of finding potential issues in code, but imo the threshold for "scary" was reached in December or even earlier This is a great hype machine for Anthropic, especially that they plan to do IPO eoy I totally agree - this is not a new capability

🚨 BREAKING: The cybersecurity industry is about to get completely disrupted. Someone just open-sourced a fully autonomous AI Red Team. It's called PentAGI. 8,200+ stars on GitHub. Not one AI agent. An entire simulated security firm. Researchers, developers, pentesters, and risk analysts. All AI. All coordinating with each other before launching a single attack. No Cobalt Strike. No $100K/year pentest retainers. No OSCP required. Here's what's inside this thing: → An Orchestrator agent that plans the full attack chain → A Researcher agent that gathers intel from the web, search engines, and vulnerability databases → A Developer agent that writes custom exploit code on the fly → An Executor agent that runs 20+ pro security tools (nmap, metasploit, sqlmap, and more) → A memory system that learns from every engagement and gets smarter over time Here's the wildest part: It runs everything inside sandboxed Docker containers. Full isolation. It picks the right container image for each task automatically. It has a knowledge graph powered by Neo4j that tracks relationships between targets, vulnerabilities, tools, and techniques across every single test. Cybersecurity firms charge $25K-$150K per engagement for this exact workflow. This is free. 100% Open Source. MIT License.

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Announcing a new Claude Code feature: Remote Control. It's rolling out now to Max users in research preview. Try it with /remote-control Start local sessions from the terminal, then continue them from your phone. Take a walk, see the sun, walk your dog without losing your flow.

someone built an entire AI RED TEAM - multiple agents that coordinate HACKING ATTACKS together, ZERO human input PentAGI, open source, one agent does recon, another scans, another exploits, another writes the report. they talk to each other and adapt based on what they find it ships as one docker container with nmap, metasploit, sqlmap, hydra preinstalled. the AI decides which tool to use and when. you point it at a target and walk away a red team engagement costs $30-50k and takes weeks. this is one docker command and API tokens

Is it just me or does $20/mo Codex give you way more usage compared to $20/mo Claude Code? Not finding a significant quality difference either.