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It's not obvious this is true. They make ~0.10% on their insto trades, and ~1-10% on their retail trades. From 2019 to 2020 instos grew 140% and retail grew 80% Now volume is up ~750%. How much of that growth is from retail vs instos? Makes a huge difference!

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Larry Cermak

@lawmaster

Feb 25, 2021

One last crazy fact from the Coinbase S1 I will throw in there today. Coinbase revenue is 96% transactional. That means that % of revenue/volume is relatively stable. So if you know volume, you can deduce revenue relatively easily. What does this mean?

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You can connect these two though and come to that conclusion. Even Q4 last year when revenue was 36% institutional, they generated 0.67% of the total volume as revenue

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where are you seeing the Q4 insto vs retail split?

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ahh -- looks like their definition of "retail" doesn't match "prime vs mobile/coinbase.com" very well, which is what really determines fees

5:43 PM · Feb 25, 2021Twitter Web App

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Well you could assume that Q1 this year will have higher retail regardless of valuation. So the ratio should theoretically really be higher than last quarter, no? Last quarter the insti volume I assume was higher than it is now

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ah I had the opposite instinct -- volatility --> lots of MMs trading with each other but idk, I could be totally wrong there FTX's % retail is up in 2021, but that's more to do with FTX's growth trajectory than market conditions necessarily

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so FWIW I'm fairly sure that they had closer to $25B of mobile app flow than the $70B that shows in 2020. I can't find any good info from them on how much that changed from quarter to quarter with volume.