Coinbase is Getting Creative. Will It Be Enough? Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN ) is in the headlines again, two weeks after laying off 18% of its staff . Twelve days before that , they’d sent new hires one of the most brutal H.R. mass emails I’ve ever seen: “Just kidding! Our hiring freeze does affect your job offer, after all!” (At least the “Chief People Officer” said they’ll get severance.) Source: Primakov | Shutterstock.com And once again…the spotlight is on Coinbase for all the wrong reasons: Even after the job cuts, “we believe Coinbase will need to make substantial reductions in its cost base in order to stem the resulting cash burn as retail trading activity dries up,” wrote Will Nance, VP and lead analyst for Payments and Digital Assets at Goldman Sachs, in his research note Monday downgrading COIN stock . It’s a bit rich to change your verdict from “Neutral” to “Sell” after the stock has already dropped -75%…in three months! If you weren’t necessarily in it for the long haul with COIN, the Super Bowl would have been a better time to cash out. (Or Thanksgiving.) That said, it’s worth looking at the fundamentals…what’s changed in just six weeks since Coinbase’s last earnings report…and what it might say about the “State of the Union” in the New Digital World, generally.