Despite a net loss of $430M in the first quarter alone, Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, remains positive about its potential as a crypto company. In the Q1 report for 2022, the cryptocurrency exchange revealed that revenue was down 27%, sliding down from revenues of $1.6B in Quarter 1 of the previous year to $1.17B in the first three months of 2022.
Even more glaring is that the revenue is way off from the revenue of the last quarter of 2021, which was $2.5B. There has also been a marked slide in transacting users, which saw a drop of 19% and now stood at 9.2M from 11.4M in the fourth quarter of 2021.
There has also been a slide of 16% in the share price of Coinbase, which closed at $73. After earnings were disclosed in trading after-hours, there was a further drop in prices to $61.
A Recent Trend For Coinbase
Coinbase’s shares have seen a steady fall since November last year when it had reached a high of $380 following its initial offer in April 2021.
Despite the worrying figures, the CEO of Coinbase said that he remained optimistic about the earnings call. He said that the company was hard to put to service the rush of customers that seek their service. He said that the down period was a change that he welcomed. He said it will help the company to concentrate on developing the next level of innovation and modernization, which will be beneficial in the coming cycles.
The CEO said that Coinbase was, in a sense, ‘greedy’ while other companies remained fearful. It continues to acquire talent and focuses on infrastructure and projects in the future.
Armstrong said that he was not averse to speaking about what he termed ‘the elephant in the room,’ the downturn in earnings in the first quarter of 2022.
Armstrong elaborated that the wider markets remained down and there was a slowdown for risk assets and growth technology stock. And Coinbase and cryptocurrencies were not immune to this downturn.
