Stephen Alpher
Stephen Alpher is CoinDesk's co-regional news chief, Americas. He holds BTC and ETH above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong took to Twitter on Friday to respond to an online petition purportedly coming from one or a group of COINBASE (COIN) workers calling out the management team for numerous mistakes and demanding the exits of Chief Operating Officer Emilie Choi, Chief Product Officer Surojit Chatterjee and Chief People Officer L.J. Brock.
"If you have no confidence in the execs of CEO of a company then why are you working at that company," asked Armstrong. "Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!" Further down the tweet thread, Armstrong said airing company dirty laundry publicly is unethical and dumb. "If you get caught you will be fired," he added.
While it has not been confirmed that the petition came from within Coinbase, Armstrong's response suggests so. "We don't have anything to add beyond Brian's tweets," said Coinbase, responding to a query from CoinDesk.
Among the issues noted in the petition were the failure of the Coinbase non-fungible token (NFT) platform, initiatives like the Dot Collector and performance review system leading to a toxic workplace culture, and the recent rescinding of job offers to new employees after just two weeks earlier promising all offers would be honored.
The final word goes to Armstrong: "In any down market, people want to start pointing fingers and find someone to blame. ... Recognize this mental trap and don't fall into it – teams have to pull together and act as one company during difficult periods, not turn on each other."
