Amid Decision To Lay Off 18 Percent Of Workers, Coinbase Employs Former Prosus Executive To Help With Indian Relaunch

Cryptocurrency platform Coinbase on Tuesday announced that it was slashing its workforce by 18 percent which translated to 1,100 workers out of a total workforce of about 5,000 employees.

The cryptocurrency company has announced that it has hired former Prosus Ventures executive Arnab Kumar to head the company’s efforts to relaunch in India. According to a spokesperson from Coinbase, the lay-off only affects 8 percent of staff in India.

Apart from being an executive at Prosus Ventures, he also worked at NITI Aayog – the apex public policy think tank of the Government of India, and the nodal agency tasked with catalyzing economic development and fostering cooperative federalism through the involvement of State Governments of India in the economic policy-making process. While he worked there, he conceptualized, oversaw, and liaised with various ministries for the Covid contact tracing app Aarogya Setu.

Apart from Arnab Kumar’s recent hire, Coinbase also recently hired Durgesh Kaushik, a former Snap executive. He will help the company launch in India and several other markets across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and the Asia Pacific region.

Back in April, Coinbase started offering crypto trading services in India. That was the first time Coinbase made its services fully functional in India. The launch came shortly after the exchange started including support for payments instruments Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and immediate payment service (IMPS) in India, unlocking its full capabilities in the world’s second-largest internet market.

Its platform, however, stopped working days after. Coinbase suspended its UPI payments on its app for users in India, bringing the situation back to its initial state.

Coinbase plans to relaunch in a bigger and better way. The exchange platform hopes to solidify its presence in the world’s second-largest internet market, and it is relevant to know that Coinbase is a backer of two of India’s biggest crypto exchanges in the country – CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber.