First, crypto's down. So are Coinbase's earnings. Nothing surprising there, and nothing Coinbase specific.
3) Second: the quarterly "look at that diversified income!" take.
Coinbase knows what they're good at: consumer crypto investing/trading.
That's where all their profit comes from.
"But how about that Services revenue?" Nah.
4) See, while they recorded ~$150m/$800m of their revenue as "services"...
...check out their opex.
See that "Transaction expense" of $167m? I'm pretty sure that includes items offsetting much of the services revenue; it's passthrough to customers from e.g. ETH staking.
5) So their real revenue was probably closer to the $650m Transaction revenue.
Once again, over 90% of that comes from retail, because of the pricing differences between the (retail) mobile app and the (mixed) website/exchange.
So, netting out the ~$150m...
6) You get a revenue of ~$650m, and expenses of...
...well:
a) $150m of marketing
b) $600m of dev payroll
c) $500m of other payroll
d) $100m of 'other'
e) $400m of balance sheet asset price decline
for a total of ~$650m rev, ~$1.4b core expenses, plus $400m impairment.
7) That leads to a loss of roughly $700m, plus another $400m from impairment.
My guess is the vast majority of the expenses are coming from payroll/bonuses/etc. here.
Coinbase has ~5k FT employees, paying roughly $4b/year for them. (Makes sense, for devs.) Revenue now ~$2.5b.
7) I *think* this include stock-based-comp.
So, roughly speaking, *annualized*, Q2 would imply:
a) $2.5b of real net revenue (~90% mobile app trading fees)
b) $4.4b of employee comp
c) $1b of other expenses
--> on net, losing roughly $3b/year, including stock based comp
8) It'll be interesting to see the impact of their recent headcount changes on upcoming earnings!
It would provide clear federal oversight to digital asset commodity markets.
3) We would find it constructive and healthy to register under such a regime, finally bringing comprehensive customer protections and oversight to spot crypto commodity markets in the US.
It would help strengthen liquidity, while fighting against bad actors in the ecosystem.
1) Voyager lost customer assets, but it still has the majority left.
Why haven't those been returned to customers yet?
Sad facts from a bankruptcy process.
2) Let's say that Voyager has, remaining, 75% of assets (I don't know the exact number).
It seems like the first thing that should happen is that customers get back the 75%, and then later get back the rest if anything is recovered from 3AC.
But that hasn't happened yet. Why?
3) Well, the *traditional* process is that before customers get their assets back, they get fucked.
First, there's a long, drawn out process, during which funds are frozen. It can take years.
Remember Mt. Gox? That process is *still going on*.
2) BlockFi has careful risk management and great leadership.
So they successfully removed at-risk counterparties preemptively.
BlockFi customer assets are appropriately managed, with no debt/risk from 3AC, Celsius, etc.
3) Sometimes leadership means acting decisively and that’s what BlockFi did: removing troublesome counterparties _before_ they become a problem, and adding cash _before_ it was necessary.