Riding Bitcoin Surge, Coinbase Active Users Grew by 117% in Q1 2021; Revenue Tops $1.8B

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase saw a whopping 117% quarter-over-quarter increase in monthly transacting users, the firm revealed Tuesday in its voluntary earnings report. All those users helped Coinbase rake in $1.8 billion over the quarter, driving a net income of approximately $730 million to $800 million, according to a new filing that comes ahead of the company’s Nasdaq listing next week.

All the numbers point to a business riding high as interest in cryptocurrency tracks upward with the price of bitcoin (BTC, -1.84%), ether (ETH, -1.92%) and other leading assets.

Active users on Coinbase jumped from 2.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2020 to 6.1 million in the first quarter of 2021. Verified users – or the total number of people with Coinbase accounts – increased from 43 million at the end of 2020 to 56 million at the end of Q1 2021. Trading volumes topped $335 billion in Q1. For all of 2020, trading volume was $193 billion. Total assets on Coinbase’s platform increased from $90 billion to $223 billion, nearly a 150% increase quarter-over-quarter. Showing how solidly Coinbase has cemented itself at the center of the current bull run, some $122 billion of those assets were from institutions.

On the retail side, the company will be adding more assets and giving people more access to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said during Tuesday’s earnings call. On the institutional side, the company will continue to build out its prime brokerage offering and use its Bison Trails acquisition to create what Armstrong called the “Amazon Web Services for crypto.”

Riding Bitcoin Surge, Coinbase Active Users Grew by 117% in Q1 2021; Revenue Tops $1.8B, CoinDesk, Apr 7