Coinbase to layoff 1100 or 18% of employees

That's my feeling as well. They just keep a table full of who owns which currency. Yeah, it takes a few more people to build in some redundancy, but that's a big number of employees.

6100 employees?? How is that even possible?

Why is that surprising? They're one of the biggest online financial institutions. Just complying with KYC laws given their number of customers takes a lot of human resources.