[matwood]

It's certainly not a perfect number, but what else are you going to do for a fast growing business? If it does 1B month 1, 5B month 2 and 10B month 3, how does an investor extrapolate the next 12 months? Obviously it's a forecast and will be imperfect without more data. Any potential large investor will be given more financials to help them determine if the 10B was a 1 time event or if it is actually recurring. The harder part is understanding the growth rate.

The be fair to Zitron he claims that enterprise customers are likely paying up front so it won't continue in future months. But now we're into accrual for the future revenues which further complicates the analysis.

[mbreese]

Even if an enterprise customer was prepaying, that would only show up on a cash balance statement, not as revenue for the month it was collected in. Yes, this is based on accrual in accounting terms. But because the revenue isn’t recognized immediately, collecting prepayment in February shouldn’t skew ARR reported in March.

[matwood]

Per GAAP you are correct, but many of these ARRs are qualified as non-GAAP. So yes, a real analysis should do what you're saying but are they is the question. Also, if they are buying tokens with no time limit, that will complicate the accrual forecast. This could be why all of the downstream investor companies like Amazon are pushing their employees to tokenmax.