Did Coinbase Just Shut Down Their Chicago office?

By Rishma Banerjee

Yes, according to reports published by Fortune on 23rd April, major United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has closed the doors of their Chicago office and scaled down the development of its matching engine. The report also notes that the exchange will be consolidating the high-frequency trading matching engine efforts into its San Francisco office. Coinbase also purportedly let go of about 30 employees, some of whom will be relocating to the area of the other office, while others will work remotely.

As per local news site Chicago Inno, initially when the company announced the opening of the Chicago office in May last year, it had planned on hiring 100 people over three years, most of them engineers.

Paul Bauerschmidt, whose LinkedIn profile says that he was the former managing director at Eris Exchange and executive director at CME Group and Derek Groothius, who previously worked as a software engineer at DRW were leading the team there. Both are reportedly leaving the company.

A spokesperson of the company told Fortune that while the closure of the office is a setback, the company will continue to hire new employees in other offices. He also noted that high-frequency trading is no longer a priority and that the company is focusing on new products.

The Block reports that this decision to close the office was made at the executive level and it has not been clarifies as to whether the employees were expecting their positions to be terminated. The Block estimated that simply the team’s salaries could have been as high as $6 million, that is not considering bonuses, office rent or the cost of technology.

As per reports, Coinbase saw around $520 million in revenue last year, 60% less than some analysts expected.

On the other hand, competing crypto exchange Binance reported $78 million in profits in Q1 2019, up 66% compared to the previous quarter.