They had the option to exercise whatever options they had vested, yes, subject to the company's normal rules.

Employees who had been with the company two years or more would have seven years to exercise. Those who had been there between one and two years would have 90 days.

Employees who had not yet been there a year would not have reached the vesting cliff, and would not have had vested options available to exercise.

This isn't accurate. All employees, regardless of tenure, got 7 years to exercise their shares that had vested up until that point.

That's surprisingly generous. Startups in Silicon Valley usually have a 30-90 day exercise window.

I guess if the point was to get rid of people then reducing the financial disincentive is a prudent move.

Armstrong is based, I'm not trying to bring in politics here or start any flamenation, I just love this clarity of the juxtaposition (the paradox of undermining something you pretend to support) in this quote from Greendwald's invective about using woke ideology, and abusing other people's suffering, as a disingenuous disguise:

In the wake of the George Floyd killing last summer, it became virtually obligatory for every large corporation to proclaim support for the #BlackLivesMatter agenda even though many, if not most, had never previously evinced the slightest interest in questions of racial justice or policing.

One of the very few companies that refused to do so was the Silicon Valley-based cryptocurrency exchange platform called Coinbase — which announced that it would remain apolitical and not involve itself in partisan debates or causes of social justice unrelated to its core business mission. When announcing that policy of political neutrality, the company’s co-founder Brian Armstrong explained that “the reason is that while I think these efforts are well intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division.” That once-anodyne announcement — to stay out of politics as a corporate entity — produced instant backlash. And exactly two months after, the notoriously censorious and politicized “tech reporters” of The New York Times punished the company for its heresy of neutrality with a lengthy article depicting Coinbase as a bastion of racism and toxic bigotry (the company was also savaged by journalists because of its audacity to reveal and respond to the NYT’s allegations in advance of the paper’s decision to publish).