X’s blue check account falsely claimed to be a recently fired Coinbase product manager and received nearly 200,000 views within hours. This meme yesterday fit perfectly into the trend of crypto investors with irresistible confirmation bias.
Yesterday, Bitcoin and Ether hit 52-week lows. Coinbase’s blockchain, Base, was down for about two hours. Everything was going wrong.
The account jokingly explained that Coinbase fired Ravi Riley as “non-technical PM of the Base Sequencer team and my first PR was integrated into production at noon.” Multiple trackers confirmed the approximately two-hour outage, even though it was not caused by Riley, who was not an employee of Coinbase.
The memetic implication was that the recruits crashed into the base and were then marched out.
As it turns out, it’s too easy to dunk on Coinbase. The company is the largest publicly traded cryptocurrency company and probably has the largest US customer base on social media.
Coinbase goes down again after Brian Armstrong fires employees
Yesterday’s meme traces its origins back to at least May 5th.
Earlier in the day, founder Brian Armstrong cut 700 jobs, or about 14% of the company’s workforce. “Today, access to Coinbase’s systems has been removed. We know this may seem sudden and harsh, but given our obligation to protect customer information, this is the only responsible choice,” he said, revoking access on the spot before most employees start work in the morning.
Within two days, Coinbase’s website was completely down. The layoffs were probably unrelated to that outage, but that didn’t matter to many critics on social media.
Armstrong tried to make some positive sense out of the layoffs, framing them as an AI-driven restructuring. Even if you spend tens of millions of dollars in restructuring costs, the vague benefits of AI will somehow improve your business.
I was fired from Coinbase today without any warning. pic.twitter.com/n0ZoQxnBRc
— Nevergoon (@nevergoon100) June 25, 2026
Staff reduction and service suspension. Armstrong’s memo spawned a meme. “Today I Got Fired from Coinbase” was an instant hit.
The most popular variants claimed absurd work performance, especially Coinbase operations that crypto traders dislike, such as issuing 1099s, freezing accounts, implementing 4H charts, and caching websites.
As with other memes on social media, people are remaking the meme in endless variations as a way to poke fun at Coinbase’s shortcomings, giving Coinbase the punchline of layoffs that literally never happened.
Base outage is over, but Coinbase memes continue
Yesterday, Base resumed normal block production within approximately two hours. Block generation stopped at 16:03 UTC after a sequence of bad blocks occurred.
According to the network status incident, this consensus failure caused the chain to stall after block 47806542. Deposits, withdrawals, and on-chain activity were all queued up behind the bad block.
Base’s official account simply said, “Base Mainnet is currently down while the team works on block generation issues.” He emphasized that the funds are safe.
Did Coinbase keep its first Bitcoin mortgage customer a secret?
The timing was tricky. This stall occurred several hours before Base’s scheduled Beryl upgrade for the same day at 18:00 UTC.
In any case, the incident revived familiar criticisms. Because Base relies on a sequencer operated by Coinbase, one bad block can bring down the entire network. A key sequencer also caused a chain outage in August 2025, the last major network outage before yesterday.
In other words, it was easy to lazily blame Coinbase for the outage. That’s what happened.
A person who repeats a joke uses Coinbase as the punchline.
Riley is a former Chainlink engineer. His post about being fired from Coinbase mimicked the now-standard layoff confessional, with the loss of Slack access and a plaintive note of remorse.
Riley is a joker on social media and has posted fake confessions about being fired in the past.
A community note on X denied Riley’s claims. “Ravi Riley was never employed by Coinbase. As confirmed by X’s bio and LinkedIn profile, he currently only lists Brookwell and has no prior positions at Coinbase.” The community note added that his post echoes previous false termination claims about a company called Delve.
His Delve post garnered 3.8 million views and was a satirical jab related to the Delve compliance scandal. His Coinbase remix kept its general format.
Despite clearly fake content and a pending community note, Riley’s post remained public until early today.
