Armstrong’s 2022: It was a rough year for Coinbase, which laid off 18% of its staff amid the economic downturn. Armstrong issued a message to his employees in June when companywide staff reductions were announced. Armstrong didn’t seem too optimistic about Coinbase’s revenue come December, especially following rival exchange FTX’s controversial crash. In an interview with Bloomberg, Armstrong articulated how he believed Coinbase’s revenue would fall by 50% or more before the end of 2022. Armstrong also expressed his thoughts on the FTX debacle, stating that it’s likely to have been a case of massive fraud rather than a simple series of mismanaging accounts, as former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried claimed. “It appears that they took customer funds from their exchange and commingled them or moved them into their hedge fund- and then ended up in a very underwater position,” Armstrong told Bloomberg. But Armstrong and his company attempted to ride the waves of the crisis, with Armstrong publishing his thoughts on regulatory clarity in cryptocurrency, underscoring the need for “regulatory clarity for centralized actors, and a level playing field across exchanges, while preserving the decentralized crypto innovations.” The company also seemed to double down on increasing public trust and highlighting transparency with the release of “Coin: A Founder’s Story” in December and a detailed look-back on Coinbase’s global 2022 operations on the Coinbase blog. Late in the year, in a move that was lauded by the cryptocurrency community, Armstrong backed privacy-preserving protocol Tornado Cash in a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury after the agency sanctioned the decentralized software following accusations of being used by North Korea to launder funds. Armstrong clarified that while he supported the Treasury “sanctioning bad actors” in the community, its actions threatened the community’s access to financial privacy.