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by vanzard 4035 days ago
They don't release their MAU numbers not because they want to hide things, but because it really is a sensitive business metric.
1 comments

Which they want to hide.

If it was showing anywhere near as good of numbers as their wallet or user counts you can bet it would be released tomorrow.

For a company that accidentally released something similar look at Bitpay which had staff bragging for the first half of last year about how they were doing $1m a day in processing only to release their 2014 EOY figures showing an average which was less than half of that.

It is very common for companies to not release MAU numbers especially in their initial years, even if they are being very successful. I challenge you to find Gmail's MAU numbers released in the first 3 years of its existence.

If you can't understand why MAU is a sensitive metric, then yeah I understand why you make up theories in your head why they must be "covering up" something.

MAU was rarely used back then so I wouldn't expect to find it.

Now it's recognized as basically the only useful metric for sites like this. GPlus, Instagram, Whatsapp, Tinder, Snapchat, and Twitter(well 4 years but close enough) all release MAU within that 3 year from launch timeframe.

So if Twitter took 4 years to release MAU, would you have accused them for 4 years that they have "something to hide"? Now you get my point. It's sensitive. Sometimes you wait years before feeling comfortable releasing this number.
Yes actually and I wouldn't be alone. Pretty much everyone was claiming Twitter was hiding numbers during that time to cover for the fact that they had mostly inactive accounts.
Yet Twitter experienced phenomenal growth, going from zero to tens of millions of MAU in their first 4 years, proving your logic wrong (paraphrasing you, you said "if growth was so great surely a company would release MAU"). So if you apply the same criticism you make against Coinbase to Twitter, you would have said in these first 4 years "Twitter's metric are all vanity metrics" and you would have rejected Twitter's claims of growth. Well you would have been misguided, as we now know for certain Twitter WAS growing during these first 4 years.

This is why you look stupid to reject exchanges' claim of growth. Yes we know MAU is less than number_of_wallets. It's mathematical. But still, it's silly for you to reject their claims of growth as you have no basis for it. Not releasing MAU doesn't mean you are not growing, as Twitter demonstrated.