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Coinbase CFO Says Bitcoin Retirement Is ‘Just Another Day in the Crypto World’
(Bloomberg) — Alesia Haas, Chief Financial Officer of Coinbase Global Inc., defended the cryptocurrency exchange’s rising expenses and volatility in the digital asset sector after the company’s shares fell despite first-round results quarter better than expected.
“When we see high volumes, which we saw a big increase in volumes in March, we tend to have a lagged effect on customer service costs as we hire these teams to deal with the queues that have resulted, so a little bit of that will spill over into the second quarter,” Haas said in an interview Friday with Bloomberg Television.
The largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, he said, is also seeing higher infrastructure costs and rising expenses related to the company’s USDC stablecoin rewards program, but noted that the company will “grow prudently.”
“We learned our lessons hard in 2021 and 2022 when we grew too quickly,” he said. Coinbase cut 20% of its staff in January 2023, just months after a major layoff in June 2022.
Shares of San Francisco-based Coinbase fell 2.5% to $223.25 on Friday. After rising more than 50% in the first quarter, the stock plunged 23% in April. Bitcoin slumped 15% last month, after jumping 67% in the quarter.
Haas highlighted the growth of the company’s Base layer-2 blockchain, highlighting the presence of social and gaming applications, as well as activity for controversial and joke-themed currencies known as memecoins.
“This is the creative content,” Haas said of memecoins. “It’s just part of the process.”
He also downplayed Bitcoin’s price decline in April, after the cryptocurrency hit a new high of more than $73,000 in March.
“It’s just another day in the cryptocurrency world,” Haas said. “That doesn’t mean the long-term outlook doesn’t continue to be as rosy as it was last week.”
Coinbase reported Thursday that revenue more than doubled to $1.58 billion, beating the $1.32 billion average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. The company said net profit was $1.17 billion, including the benefit from an accounting change. It had a loss in the one-year period ago.
–With assistance from Sonali Basak.
(Adds video interview and update with final stock price.)
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