- A large portion of Coinbase’s revenue is from trading fees, and they don’t expect profits to soar anytime soon.
- CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, says SBF ‘commingled funds’ and calls for ‘stolen’ money to be ‘clawed back.’
- Coinbase shares are down 80% from their peak in 2022.
The CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, said the exchange’s end-of-year revenue would be down by ‘roughly half.’ During an in-depth interview on Bloomberg’s David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations, he said:
“Last year in 2021, we did about $7 billion of revenue and about $4 billion of positive EBITDA, and this year with everything coming down, it’s looking, you know, about roughly half that or less.”
A Coinbase spokesperson also confirmed that revenue in 2022 is expected to be less than half the revenue in 2021. Like many stocks, shares, and cryptocurrencies, Coinbase is down 88.06% from its all-time high.
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After Armstrong’s interview, the share price dropped a further 1.64% to the current trading price of $40.57 as of press time. The all-time low is $40.32 as of today.
Armstrong publicly spoke against SBF, claiming customer funds were ‘stolen.’ In his latest media appearance with Bloomberg, Armstrong claims the FTX downfall is a ‘black mark on the industry’ and compares SBF to other bad actors like Bernie Madoff. He also says:
“It appears that they [FTX] took customer funds from their exchange and actually commingled them or moved them into their hedge fund and then ended up in a very underwater position…
I think there’s some really serious questions to be asked now about should some of that money be clawed back because it appears that it was stolen from customers.”
Armstrong welcomed regulation, calling it a ‘good thing’ as he continues to work with regulatory authorities across G20 countries.
On the Flipside
- Renowned options trader Nassim Taleb calls the publicly listed Coinbase “worthless,” but he does not see Coinbase seeing the same fate as FTX.
- SBF didn’t just ‘commingle funds.’ He is now being investigated by U.S prosecutors for his role in the collapse of Terra.
Why You Should Care
Coinbase is a long-standing crypto powerhouse, touted as one of the safest exchanges. They are regulated in many countries, with customer deposits insured to a certain level. Brian Armstrong is a figurehead for beneficial crypto regulation, and it’s an important time to pay attention to exchanges and their announcements in the wake of the FTX crisis.
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