Crypto.com has laid off around 180 employees, and the company is pointing directly at artificial intelligence as the reason. The Singapore-headquartered cryptocurrency exchange let go of roughly 12% of its global workforce, with CEO Kris Marszalek making clear the cuts are a deliberate strategic restructuring, not a reaction to a turbulent market.
“Companies that do not make this pivot immediately will fail,” Marszalek wrote on X Thursday. “Companies that move slowly will be left behind.” All affected employees have received notification and transition support, according to a company spokesperson.
A $70 Million Bet Taking Shape
The timing is difficult to ignore. Just six weeks ago, Crypto.com paid $70 million in cryptocurrency for the domain AI.com. This is the largest publicly confirmed domain purchase in history, more than doubling the previous record. Marszalek followed it up with a Super Bowl commercial promoting a personal AI agent platform built to handle trading, scheduling, and messaging. The site crashed under traffic the moment the ad ended.
The layoffs now put muscle behind that bet. Marszalek made it clear that AI.com was never just a branding play, but it is the stated reason for rebuilding the company around a smaller, AI-powered workforce.
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An Industry-Wide Trend
Crypto.com is not alone in using AI to justify workforce reductions. Last month, Block cut more than 4,000 employees, which is nearly half its staff. CEO Jack Dorsey told shareholders that intelligence tools had changed what it fundamentally means to run a company. Meta is reportedly planning cuts affecting up to 20% of its workforce to offset rising AI infrastructure costs, while Atlassian eliminated around 1,600 jobs to redirect funds toward AI investment.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott warned last week that unemployment among fresh college graduates “could easily go into the mid-30s” within a few years as AI agents take over entry-level work.
For the 180 people who lost their jobs at Crypto.com, the pivot is already complete. For Marszalek, the harder work is still ahead. He has built his career on acquiring assets others undervalued and turning them into something larger. He did it with a domain name in 2018, and he is now betting he can do it again with an AI platform in 2025. The difference this time is that hundreds of competitors are making the same bet simultaneously, the technology is moving faster than any single company can control, and the cost of being wrong is measured not just in dollars, but in livelihoods.
