Coinbase CFO on Q2 results: “we’re building deep roots with institutional clients”

Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ: COIN) reported better than expected results for its fiscal second quarter on Tuesday, after the bell. Shares of the company were seen about 7% up this morning.

CFO Haas discusses earnings on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”

Discussing earnings on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”, CFO Alesia Haas acknowledged that Coinbase benefitted greatly from the recent volatility in crypto trading, but expressed confidence that adding new assets will help “diversify and tamp out some of that volatility”.

“What we’re starting to see is utility in crypto, we’re seeing people engage in staking, we’re seeing people engage in URN and other transaction types. This is also growing, at a more rapid pace now than our transaction fee, although only 5.0% of our revenue,” she added.

Also on Wednesday, Coinbase, which added 2.7 million monthly transacting users in Q2, said it was working on a crypto deal with PNC Financial Services Group.

Ethereum trading surpassed Bitcoin in Q2

The second quarter marked the first time Coinbase saw Ethereum trading on its platform surpass Bitcoin trading, which made up roughly 24% of the total quarterly trading volume only versus 39% in the prior quarter (Q1). Commenting further on this diversity, Haas said in his interview with CNBC:

“Ethereum saw greater trading volume this quarter due to the growth of NFTs. Also, we saw Eth2 staking, and the network is transitioning now to a proof of stake from a proof of work network, and that grew a lot of investor interest and a lot of interest in opportunities to earn rewards on the Eth2 blockchain.”

Coinbase now has Tesla and Third Point on its platform

The finance chief acknowledged that years into the future, crypto might be commoditised, but it certainly wasn’t “quite there yet”. Coinbase now has notable institutional clients on its platform like Elon Musk’s Tesla and Dan Loeb’s Third Point. According to Haas, these big names join the platform primarily for security.

“They appreciate that we’ve not had a loss due to a cyber attack since our inception. From there, it moves into trading, data services, borrow lend products that we’re building on our platform, and the full suite of the prime brokerage products under the beta initiative that we launched this quarter. So, we’re really building deep roots with a lot of institutional clients across their investing needs in the crypto economy,” she added.