A lot of attention has been paid to Coinbase’s box office earnings in the final three months of 2024.
That’s with good reason. The crypto exchange’s results far surpassed analyst expectations, with the best quarterly revenues for three years.
Net income stood at $1.3 billion from October to December — a 280% rise when compared with the same period a year earlier, when the bull run was kicking off.
We all know why. Donald Trump’s return to the White House as a pro-Bitcoin president has sparked a trading frenzy, and a ‘golden age’ for crypto.
Image: CoinbaseCoinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong recently met Trump in Mar-a-Lago — and is tipped to serve in the administration’s crypto advisory council.
And that means his outlook on the state of the industry, not to mention his company’s plans for the future, now matters a great deal.
His exchange played an instrumental role in the Stand With Crypto campaign that carefully scrutinized the policy positions of U.S. election candidates — a role this group will undoubtedly reprise during the midterms.
Armstrong is also banging the drum for regulatory change, especially at the Securities and Exchange Commission, after years of frustration.
On an earnings call with investors, he argued that “it’s hard to overstate the significance of the change that’s happened in the last few months.”
The CEO says the transformation in attitudes toward crypto in the U.S. is prompting the rest of the world to take notice, and Coinbase now has a tried-and-tested playbook for expanding into international markets.
Bold Predictions
Crypto executives are prone to making skyhigh predictions about everything from Bitcoin’s price to mass adoption during bull markets. We’ve seen it time and time and time again… in 2017 and 2021 especially.
But admittedly, the landscape feels quite different now Wall Street institutions are piling into the space — with governments openly pondering whether to start holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets.
Perhaps the newsiest bit of Armstrong’s call with analysts was when he said this:
“It’s a little bit like the early 2000s when every company had to figure out how to adapt to the Internet. Up to 10% of global GDP could be running on crypto rails by the end of this decade. And Coinbase is going to be the preferred partner to come in and build this for many of the companies out there because we have the most trusted and scalable infrastructure with the longest track record.”
That’s a huge prediction not far into the future — but then again, stablecoins are really taking off, and Coinbase has close ties with USDC.
“We also have a stretch goal to make USDC the number one dollar stablecoin. We’re very bullish on stablecoins. We think USDC has a network effect behind it. And the compliant approach that they’ve taken is, I think, going to be really defensible long term. So we’ll be accelerating the market cap growth of USDC with more partnerships and leaning into new use cases like adding payment support across our product suite.”
Armstrong argued that crypto “is much, much more than an asset class that people want to trade” — and soon, there will be “daily use cases for everybody in the world as crypto updates the global financial system.”
“We’re already at scale, I’d say, on stablecoin payments. There was $30 trillion of crypto stablecoin volume last year. That was up 3x year over year. And so we’re moving with haste to integrate crypto payments across our entire suite of products. We think that’ll be a big business over time.”
Coinbase is well-positioned to take advantage of this seismic shift, with chief financial officer Alesia Haas revealing that the exchange was managing $404 billion in assets as of December 31 — equivalent to 12% of the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies.
When grilled specifically on the changing regulatory regime in Washington, Armstrong said:
“It’s really been a sea change and it’s been great. I think we have access to all the relevant decision makers and folks in government now. It doesn’t mean they’re all going to do what we want, but at least we can get meetings and share our point of view. They can take input from all the relevant parties to come up with clear rules.”
As he’s previously suggested on X, one area of focus is changing Coinbase’s listing process, as the company’s review team is currently unable to keep up with vetting the vast number of tokens entering the ecosystem each week. Some estimates put that figure at one million.
He argues the platform “needs to deeply integrate decentralized exchanges into our product” — adding:
“We also need to balance giving customers access to what they want with appropriate disclosures and consumer protection so that they know that they’re trading the appropriate asset … there might be 100,000 results in Google, but you kind of want to only look at the first page or if you search for some product on Amazon, there might be thousands of them, but you want to buy the one with the best reviews. So I think there’s a variety of ways that we can balance that consumer protection with giving customers access to the broad range of assets out there.”
A recurring theme during the Q&A was trust, with Brian Armstrong capitalizing on the brand recognition it has built in recent years.
“We really want everyone to come into crypto. And I keep saying this and maybe people don’t fully believe me, but it’s really true. We’re trying to get the global financial system updated and have more and more global GDP run on crypto rails. We think that a more efficient, fair and free world will accelerate progress, and it creates economic freedom. And we’re going to have to have every bank, every payment company, every brokerage integrate crypto into their platforms.”
Should the bull run continue to gain steam — and shake off its current paralysis — Coinbase could be a stock worth watching.
The post Coinbase Just Made Huge Predictions on Crypto’s Future appeared first on Cryptonews.
