Coinbase’s first-quarter revenue hits record $1.8B ahead of its Nasdaq listing

Coinbase raked in $1.8 billion revenue in the first quarter of this year, according to new figures released one week prior to the company’s public listing on Nasdaq.

Coinbase has announced impressive first-quarter results one week before the exchange’s direct listing on Nasdaq, estimating that trading volume is up 276% and quarterly revenue has hit $1.8 billion.

The bountiful revenue, revealed in the company’s Q1 earnings call, dwarfs its $190-million revenue from the same time last year, with the company attributing a portion of this explosive growth to Bitcoin’s (BTC) bull market.

The American exchange estimated net income between $730 million and $800 million and an EBIDTA of approximately $1.1 billion.

The bull market has also seen monthly active users grow to more than 6 million users, up from 1.3 million in the first quarter, with crypto assets on the platform rising 1,200% year-on-year from $17 billion to $223 billion.

The U.S.-based exchange’s chief financial officer, Alesia Haas, said:

“We have seen all-time high crypto prices drive elevated levels of user activity and trading volume on our platform.”

Boasting 56 million verified users, Haas suggested that active monthly users could rise to 7 million at most this year, although she warned this could drop to 4 million if a bear market hits this year.

The company is spending big to acquire new customers. Following next week’s listing, Coinbase intends to increase its sales and marketing expenditure to between 12% and 15% of this year’s net revenue in an effort to drive “meaningful growth in 2021.”

“Looking to full year 2021, in order to scale our operations and to continue to drive product innovation, we expect our technology and development expenses and our general and administrative expenses to be between $1.3 billion to $1.6 billion, excluding stock-based compensation, in 2021.”

The report results are preliminary and unaudited, however, the exchange wanted to release a detailed report prior to the Nasdaq listing set for April 14. The company will register nearly 115 million shares of Class A common stock under the ticker symbol COIN. As a direct listing, the exchange won’t be selling new stock and can only register existing stock, allowing existing stakeholders to sell their shares to new investors.

Coinbase has received multiple valuations ranging from $68 billion based on private market transactions to more than $120 billion.

Investment research firm New Constructs CEO David Trainer had his doubts about the lofty expectations. “Coinbase’s expected valuation of roughly $100 billion is far too high,” he said in a note to clients Monday.

“It’s hard to make a straight-faced argument that the firm can justify the lofty expectations baked into its valuation given increasing competition in a mature cryptocurrency trading market and the lack of sustainability in its current market share and margins.”

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried took to Twitter to congratulate Coinbase on its impressive quarterly figures and upcoming IPO listing and compared it to his own, much newer exchange’s figures.

5) FWIW, FTX likely had:a) ~5-15% of the revenueb) ~10-25% of the earningsc) ~2x the volumed) way fewer userse) higher in-quarter growthf) a bit higher year-on-year growth(NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE, NOT AUDITED YET, JUST ESTIMATES)

— SBF (@SBF_Alameda) April 6, 2021