[rotskoff]

It's an interesting and complicated question, but it seems like the coinbase business model should be pretty dramatically affected by the massive sell-off. First, as prices go lower, the average value of a transaction is (probably) declining, so the money they make on fees is (probably) going down as well. Second, as the market looks worse and worse, the number of people casually entering or trading is likely declining too. The have a lot of correlated risk with the decline.

[gfodor]

The impact of the variables you mention can't be assessed without understanding the internals of their business. For example, if they have a lot of fixed or hard-to-change operating costs (like headcount) that have been taken on that now assume a certain amount of transaction volume, you may be right. But if they have just had their average revenue per employee spike over the last 18 months (after all, ETH is trading where it was in May last year) then what we just went through was more of a windfall-laden anomaly for their business to accrue a rainy day fund not necessarily something they were dependent upon.

In any case, given the volatility of crypto and the survivorship of Coinbase vs all other exchanges, it'd be surprising to me if they didn't manage their business in a way that assumed a 10X cut in price could happen at any time.

[mcfunley]

Greg would it really surprise you if a tech startup turned out to have done something stupid

[gfodor]

Haha no not in general, but at this point Coinbase has survived some pretty severe market swings, so if you ask me with no additional info (of which I have basically none on Coinbase) I'd assume they at least have some institutional awareness that a 90% drop in all the coins they offer is not perceived to be an "INF sigma" event. (Which it probably was perceived as for a vast number of the know-nothing ICO schemes)