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9:15 PM · Aug 9, 2022Twitter Web App

2) A lot of the same mistaken takes on it. First, crypto's down. So are Coinbase's earnings. Nothing surprising there, and nothing Coinbase specific.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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

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