North America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, has grand plans beyond just facilitating the trading of digital assets.
Following in the footsteps of e-commerce giant Amazon, Coinbase is offering its own suite of cloud services being dubbed Coinbase Cloud.
Speaking to Forbes, Coinbase chief product officer Surojit Chatterjee admitted that the company wants to be the AWS of crypto.
We are building this whole Coinbase Cloud suite of products that you can think of as crypto computing services, to help developers build their applications faster.
AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is a subsidiary of the parent company providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments. Last year, AWS returned $13.5 billion in annual operating profits of around 63% of Amazon’s total, so it is clearly the lucrative slice of the overall business pie.
Coinbase into the Cloud
Coinbase currently derives the lion’s share of its revenue from transaction fees, some of which are the highest in the industry. In Q3, the company reported quarterly revenue of $1.2 billion, 88% of which came from those hefty fees.
The exchange clearly wants a slice of the cloud and aims to be the first crypto company to get there. It’s also looking to supplement its trading revenues with subscription services.
Coinbase already offers an institutional custody service, staking services, a learning rewards portal, e-commerce checkout programs, and Visa debit cards for eligible customers.
In January, the exchange announced that it was acquiring the leading blockchain infrastructure platform, Bison Trails. Company co-founders Joe Lallouz and Aaron Henshaw became the new heads of Coinbase Cloud. This acquisition was a key part of its transition to supporting a more mature financial ecosystem, according to Chatterjee who added “our goal is to be the primary financial account of the crypto economy for our customers.”
Coinbase reported that its Cloud platform currently has over $30 billion assets staked across more than 25 protocols with around 60,000 nodes. However, it did not disclose revenue from Cloud in its financial statements, Forbes reported.
The Cloud platform would also be a good fit for its NFT marketplace plans which garnered one million registrations for the waiting list in October.
Stock price update
Coinbase stock has taken a tumble this week, falling from around $320 on Monday to $295 in after-hours trading on Dec 1 according to MarketWatch.
COIN hit an all-time high of $357 on Nov 9 but has declined further with the wider market retreat this week.
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