Settings

Theme

Coinbase earnings: $1.1B loss, lower-than-expected revenue

bloomberg.com

42 points by owenwil 3 years ago · 13 comments

Reader

kragen 3 years ago

Ouch, Coinbase lost over an Instagram this quarter! That sucks.

Is this article implying that they had a long position in cryptocoins? I thought they only held them on behalf of their customers, who were the ones taking the risks, while they reaped transaction fees. Or did they really lose money just because their trading volume fell?

Yields of 10% on bonds maturing in four years is high, but it doesn't imply an overwhelming level of risk.

  • nknealk 3 years ago

    I actually think the yield is concerning. For fun, you can plug in your own assumptions to this calculator [0], but with assumptions below, the yield on bonds due 2028 implies a 20% chance of default.

    Market price is 0.7/face value of 1/coupon of 3.375 (from the article), payments per year = 1 with 7 payments remaining (you could also do 6, depends on whether they've made a payment this year which I didn't bother looking up), recovery rate of 60% (assumption, the model is really sensitive to this input), and the 5 year treasury rate is around 2.97 percent which I used as the risk free rate.

    [0] https://quantwolf.com/calculators/bonddefaultcalc.html

    • kragen 3 years ago

      Thank you for quantifying that. I was thinking it meant about a 10% chance of default and about a 10% chance of bankruptcy, and I appreciate the correction.

      10% or 20% is "concerning" from some points of view, but what I meant was that creditors still think Coinbase is more likely to be in business 5 years from now than to be bankrupt.

  • stevedewald 3 years ago

    They really lost money because their trading volume fell.

pharmakom 3 years ago

How do you lose money charging fees on exchange transactions?

Melting_Harps 3 years ago

Lets see how they handle the other 2 lawsuits pending [0]; their stock price had a recent boost due to their partnership with Blackrock, but I cannot see how they are walking away from this. It's about time, too; CONbase is a blight in the ecosystem.

0: https://cointelegraph.com/news/two-more-lawsuits-for-coinbas...

spaceman_2020 3 years ago

Cash reserves down 1.5B from December 2021. Another 2 years of crypto winter + economic downturn and this can turn nasty.

They haven’t innovated at all and are getting their arse kicked by FTX and Binance.

htrp 3 years ago

377mn non cash impairment charge......

Keyboard Shortcuts

j
Next item
k
Previous item
o / Enter
Open selected item
?
Show this help
Esc
Close modal / clear selection