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Want to Estimate Coinbase's Quarterly Revenue? We Built a Calculator For You.

As The Street seems to continually underestimate the company’s revenues, we felt it was important to provide a resource to those who want to come up with their own conclusions.

Since launching CoinSnacks in early 2018, we have been covering every Coinbase quarterly earnings.

And as The Street seems to continually underestimate the company’s revenues, we felt it was important to provide a resource to those who want to come up with their own conclusions.

In the following post, we will explain exactly how to come up with your own calculation of Coinbase’s revenue and provide a calculator that you can simply fill out with your data to get a quick and easy number.

Click here to jump straight to the calculator.

Table of Contents

How to Calculate Coinbase’s Revenue

To calculate Coinbase’s total revenue, there are only a few metrics you need to consider:

  1. Retail volume and take rate

  2. Institutional volume and take rate

  3. International take rate

  4. Subscriptions & services revenue.

We will go through each of these below explaining exactly how to get the numbers and by going through example calculations for Q1’24.

A note on trading volumes: Finding the total amount of volume traded on Coinbase is relatively easy. The Block actually makes it quite simple here. For the following calculations we will be using Coinbase’s Q1’24 total volume of $306 billion.

Retail Volume and Take Rate

By far the most important components of the entire calculation come down to retail traders: how much total cryptoassets they traded (volume) and Coinbase’s average take rate (the fee they charged the customers to make the trades).

As we explained above, we can easily see the total amount of volume occurring on Coinbase. What we don’t know is the percentage of that volume that is retail vs institutional.

Since 2021, the historical average is ~19%, but has ranged from 14-32%. The percentage of retail volume historically has increased in bull markets.

Next, we need to look at take rate.

The historical retail take rate is ~1.6%, but has ranged from 1.10-2.50%.

Once we have selected our numbers, we can simply plug them into our calculator to get the revenue generated by Coinbase from their retail base.

In the following example we assumed a 19% retail volume and 1.7% take rate resulting in $988 million in revenue for Coinbase from it’s retail segment.

Retail + Institutional Vol

$306,000,000,000

% Retail volume?

19%

Retail take rate?

1.7%

Retail revenue

$988,380,000

Institutional Volume and Take Rate

Next, we need to look at institutional volume and take rate.

While the amount of volume traded in this segment is significantly larger than the retail component, the take rate is also significantly lower.

Since 2021, the historical take rate for this component is .0212% and has historically ranged from ~.01-.03%.

If we use the retail volume of 19% from above, we naturally get an 81% institutional component.

Assuming a .024% take rate and we get $59.48 million from this segment.

Retail + Institutional Vol

$306,000,000,000

% Retail volume?

81%

Retail take rate?

.024%

Institutional revenue

$59,486,400

International Take Rate

Coinbase’s International is a relatively new component of the business and therefore a bit harder to model.

While Coinbase advertises the following fees on their website, they have also stated on the earnings call that they are incentivizing usage in the early days.

“We are offering tiered pricing over time. But right now, it's going to be competitive to build liquidity and attract users and we'll experiment and adjust as we scale.”

Alesia Haas, CFO; Q4’23 Earnings call

In Q1’24 Coinbase did ~$76 billion in volume. Using this number and assuming an international take rate of .021% (again, this is a total guess), we get $16 million in revenue for the quarter.

International volume

$76,379,000,000

International take rate?

.021%

International revenue

$16,039,590

Subscriptions & Services Revenue

The last component we need to look at is the company’s Subscription & Services revenue.

As of today, the main components of this section are:

  1. Custodial fee revenue

  2. Blockchain rewards

  3. Stablecoin revenue

  4. Interest income

  5. Other

While stablecoin revenue, interest income, and blockchain rewards can be calculated with a bit of effort, we suggest following analysts such as @CoinbaseDuck and @Kunalgoel who dig into these numbers a bit more specifically.

The outlier for 2024 and beyond is the revenue that Coinbase will be generating from BASE. We will learn more in the Q1’24 earnings.

For our calculation, we simply took the high end of Coinbase’s guidance of $410-480 million.

Is this number to low? Perhaps. But it’s a start.

Total Revenue

Taking these three calculations and adding them up we get a total quarterly revenue estimate for Q1’24 of $1,543,905,990.

Retail revenue

$988,380,000

Institutional revenue

$59,486,400

International revenue

$16,039,590

S&S

$480,000,000

Total Revenue

$1,543,905,990

Want to Do Your Own Calculations?

To fill out the calculator with your own data, just make a copy of the sheet located here.

Fill it out and let us know what you think the revenues will be for the upcoming quarter. We will continue to update the numbers in the sheet quarterly.


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