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

Just gave Kate oral sex. Goodnight everyone.

Anthropic CEO (Dario Amodei): "Coding is going away first, then all of software engineering." What do you think about this?

It should NOT be this hard to buy a privacy-respecting printer. Seriously. A printer should be one of the simplest devices in the house. You send it a document. It puts ink or toner on paper. That should be the whole relationship. Instead, the mainstream printer market has become a swamp of cloud accounts, mobile apps, subscriptions, cartridge DRM, remote diagnostics, vendor lock-in, and “smart” features nobody asked for. HP is the canonical example of how bad this got. HP ties the printer to an HP account, an internet connection, and original HP ink for the life of the device. Dynamic Security can reject cartridges based on vendor-controlled firmware rules. Instant Ink turns printing into a subscription relationship. Why does it need to talk to the vendor just to do the one job it was built for? And from a security perspective, this is a nightmare. A Wi-Fi printer is a computer on your LAN. It has firmware, network services, a web admin panel, default settings, cloud features, and sometimes stored documents or saved credentials. A compromised printer can expose services. It can: - advertise itself to the LAN - store print jobs and scans - keep address books and scan destinations - hold credentials for scan-to-email, scan-to-SMB, scan-to-FTP, LDAP, or remote management And it usually sits on the same network as your laptop, phone, NAS, smart home devices, and sometimes work machine. Used printers are worse. Assume the previous owner left behind Wi-Fi settings, scan destinations, address books, stored credentials, and cached documents. One reason to prefer black-and-white: many color laser printers can embed machine identification codes into printed pages. Yellow dots are the famous version. The broader issue is forensic marking. Good intel on this is weirdly hard to come by.

Wanted to provide more clarity about this. Yesterday, we had a regression in merge queue behavior where, in some cases, squash or rebase commits were generated from the wrong base state, making earlier changes appear reverted in branch history. 2,804 pull requests out of over 4M merged on April 23 (roughly 0.07%) were affected. We fixed the issue, we've contacted every impacted customer, and we're expanding our automated test coverage for merge queue operations. The team will be updating the status page with RCA details as well.

This GitHub incident is insane. Merge queue commits have been reverting previously merged commits at random. This not only breaks the mental contract teams have with Git in general, but is subtle enough to be really hard to unravel after the fact. githubstatus.com/incidents/z…