Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rawtxapp 1910 days ago
> But I have no idea if people use that feature frequently.

Looks like they made 4.57B$ in revenue with 97M$ in profit [1]. And "We’ve continued to see strong adoption, with 3 million customers [buying bitcoin] through the past year, and in January we saw 1 million new to bitcoin in just one month."

1: https://www.coindesk.com/square-cash-app-bitcoin-revenues-sw...

1 comments

It's a bit odd to count that as revenue. Like Robinhood counting their entire trade volume of $350 billion as "revenue".
Unfortunately under US accounting rules you have to do it this way in your financial filings.
But bigger brokers (in fact, much more than just brokers) like Merrill ($18B) or Schwab($10B) do not report their transaction volume as revenue.
I'm having trouble finding a good citation, but I think the GP is referring to a quirk of US accounting rules that causes crypto trades specifically to be counted as revenue. The same does not apply to traditional financial market trades, which I think is what your numbers are.
But we are talking about Robinhood here. I doubt they trade $350B worth of crypto.
Weirdly, it seems there are no GAAP accounting rules for cryptocurrencies yet. Apparently there is informal guidance that it should be treated as an intangible asset:

https://news.bloombergtax.com/financial-accounting/tesla-bit...