Coinbase Is So Back (in Profit): Stock Jumps 11% as Crypto Exchange Posts Bullish Returns

Coinbase made a $273.4 million profit in Q4 2023, thanks to higher interest income it earned on its stablecoin reserves and other products.

2 min read

Feb 15, 2024

America’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase reported a successful final quarter of 2023.

The San Francisco-based company’s Q4 2023 results showed that the company reported a profit of $273.4 million, compared with a loss of $557 million the same quarter one year ago. In Q3 2023, the exchange had reported a loss of $2 million in profit.

Coinbase also makes money from interest earned on its USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin. This product helped the exchange swing to profit because it jumped nearly 18% to $171.6 million.

The exchange said that it had strengthened its balance sheet by reducing debt by $413 million.

“All told, Coinbase is a fundamentally stronger company today than a year ago, and we are in a strong financial position to capitalize on the opportunities ahead,” the company wrote in its letter to shareholders.

The crypto exchange—which went public in 2021—was doing well on the Nasdaq before earnings dropped. And the market is responding strongly to the report, with shares jumping 11% in after-hours trading.

COIN is currently priced above $165 per share and is up 135% over the past 12 months.

Things have improved for the company after a difficult 2022 and 2023 marred by a brutal crypto winter, tough regulatory action, lawsuits and layoffs.

Most notably, Wall Street’s top regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission sued the exchange last year, alleging that it had sold unregistered securities through its staking service. Coinbase is now fighting to dismiss the lawsuit.

Coinbase’s good quarter is down to an improved crypto market. Bitcoin shot up throughout 2023 thanks to a number of high-profile crypto exchange-traded fund (ETF) proposals from Wall Street firms; the subsequent approval of the long-awaited products in January has only helped the price of the asset.

Coinbase provides custody and other services to nearly all the spot Bitcoin issuers—making it an even bigger player in the crypto sphere.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

Get crypto news straight to your inbox--

sign up for the Decrypt Daily below. (It’s free).

Get Email!

United States of Bitcoin? These States Are Considering BTC Reserves

Donald Trump and his political allies are plugging away at plans to stockpile Bitcoin at a national level in the U.S. Treasury. And now, with the asset’s price repeatedly soaring to new peaks since Election Day, some U.S. states are following suit. So far, three states are fielding proposals to establish strategic Bitcoin reserves, while digital asset advocates are calling for other local governments to do the same. Bitcoin Strategic Reserve Is Now on the Table—Here's How It Could Work Here'...

AI Won’t Tell You How to Build a Bomb—Unless You Say It’s a 'b0mB'

Remember when we thought AI security was all about sophisticated cyber-defenses and complex neural architectures? Well, Anthropic's latest research shows how today’s advanced AI hacking techniques can be executed by a child in kindergarten. Anthropic—which likes to rattle AI doorknobs to find vulnerabilities to later be able to counter them—found a hole it calls a “Best-of-N (BoN)” jailbreak. It works by creating variations of forbidden queries that technically mean the same thing, but are expre...

Elon Musk and Dogecoin: How the Billionaire Became the 'Dogefather'

As Dogecoin makes a comeback off the back of Bitcoin’s surge, some may be pondering: Where did the asset come from? What’s it for? And what’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk got to do with it? The original meme coin’s boom largely has the world’s richest man to thank. Musk’s obsession with shitposting helped boost the coin to a top 10 cryptocurrency. It’s been a wacky ride over the past few years, culminating in Musk's appointment to co-lead a government agency called D.O.G.E.—yes, really. But we'll explai...

News

Courses

Deep Dives

Coins

Videos