Coinbase, which is one of the leading Cryptocurrency Exchanges in the United States has closed its operations in Chicago and also scaled down the development of the matching engine, the report was shared by Fortune on April 23.
According to the report, the exchange will unite the high-frequency trading engine matching efforts into its San-Francisco office. Coinbase has also laid off 30 employees just after the year of opening the office. The firm will relocate some employees to the other office while others will work remotely.
The office which assisted a division known as Coinbase markets focused at institutional investors was working on developing a new "matching engine" which helped in high-frequency trading.
Based on the local news site Chicago Inno, when firm declared that it will open Chicago Office last year, it has decided to hire 100 people in the upcoming three years, majority of those were going to be engineers.
The office was directed by Paul Bauerschmidt, who was a former managing director at Eris Exchange and executive director at CME Group and Derek Groothius, who was a former software engineer at DRW. Both of them are now leaving the firm.
One of the Spokesperson said to Coindesk that,
“To become the ‘Google of crypto’ we have to be comfortable making big bets. Some of them will be audacious and some of them won’t work out.”
The spokesperson said even if the closure of office is a setback, the firm will continue to hire new employees in the other sectors. The firm mentioned that high-frequency trading products are no longer a priority and that will now onwards focus on different products including custody services and over-the-counter trading. Development of the matching engine will proceed further but on low priority.
The Block announced that the decision to close the office is made at the executive level and it's obscure whether employees were hoping their positions to be terminated. The Block anticipated that mainly the team's salaries would be as high as $6 million, without considering the bonuses, office rent or the technology cost.
Before a week, we reported that Coinbase made 60% less revenue as compared to the last year, some of the analysts expected.