The logo for Coinbase Global Inc, the biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, is displayed on the Nasdaq MarketSite jumbotron and others at Times Square in New York, U.S., April 14, 2021.
Shannon Stapleton | Reuters
Coinbase shares were down about 3% in after-hours trading on Thursday, despite revenue and net income skyrocketing in the first quarter of 2021 as the cryptocurrency trading platform capitalized on a boom in crypto prices and corresponding interest from investors.
Here’s how the cryptocurrency exchange did in its first earnings report since the company’s direct listing in April:
- Earnings: $3.05 per share
- Revenue: $1.80 billion, up from $585 million in the previous quarter.
The company’s net profit for the quarter was over $771 million, more than four-fold over Q4 2020’s figure of $177 million and more than 24 times higher than the year-ago quarter’s profit.
Monthly transacting users more than doubled from the previous quarter, from 2.8 million to 6.1 million. Coinbase’s 56 million verified users, along with record-breaking price moves in the crypto market, led trading volume to more than triple from the previous quarter.
Coinbase’s fate is tethered to the performance of digital assets like bitcoin. Roughly 94% of the company’s net revenue in the first quarter came from transaction fees from trading. In an introductory note, the company noted that bitcoin prices nearly doubled during the quarter, and ether prices almost tripled.
During last month’s direct listing, Coinbase opened at $381 per share and was briefly valued at as much as $100 billion, a landmark event for the cryptocurrency industry.
There are concerns that crypto price volatility, regulatory uncertainty, and competition from new players such as Binance, Kraken, and Gemini may weigh on the company’s share price.
Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas told CNBC that the company’s main focus in the first quarter was reliability. “We are dealing with unprecedented growth in demand, and our focus was making sure that our exchange stayed up.”
In its release, Coinbase did not offer detailed revenue nor earnings guidance for either Q2 or the full year, warning that, “As we have previously discussed, it is important for investors to remember that our business is inherently unpredictable.” However, it offered guidance of between 5.5 million and 9.0 million monthly transacting users for the full year, depending on crypto prices, and predicted that annual average net revenue would exceed the historic mark of $35 to $45 that it’s averaged for the last two years.
Excluding the after-hours move, Coinbase stock has fallen about 30.4% since going public on Apr. 14, while the Nasdaq is up about 2.5% over the same period.
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