Aiera/aiera-transcript-sentiment huggingface dataset:
Well, we want to make it easier and easier for every customer of ours out there to calculate this so that "it just works." And you don't have to -- if you bought some crypto and went up in value and now you want to spend it on an NFT or with Coinbase commerce, that all just works.
Sentiment: neutral
So we produce one simple form for you at the end of the year and government's copy, you get a copy, just like any other kind of financial service firm out there.
Sentiment: neutral
So that's going to be great for crypto.
Sentiment: positive
And I think the good news is that we're getting very close to having that ready.
Sentiment: positive
So we've already started rolling out something called the Coinbase Tax Center.
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And basically, this is a single portal where customers can just download that 1 form at the end of the year.
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If you're using Coinbase products today, let's say, Coinbase Commerce and you buy the crypto on Coinbase, we can help track all of that for you, so you don't have to worry about it.
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Now in the future, I would love to see the crypto industry actually even develop some kind of common standards, so between different companies, it's actually interoperable.
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So like if you bought the crypto somewhere else, then you move it here, you spend it there, like there's a way to do information sharing behind the scenes.
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And so there might be more that we can do on that in the future.
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But I think the Coinbase Tax Center we're rolling out is going to be a huge step in the right direction and make it "just work" for people who are on Coinbase products at least.
Sentiment: positive
Secondly, you asked about cost basis and profitability, the gain/loss type summary.
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And this is a feature that we also feel is important.
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We've been working on it for a while.
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So by Q1, in time for tax season, you should see a support for that rollout.
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So a question from [Tony P.] who asked about competition.
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How do you think about the competitive landscape?
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And who or what do you view as Coinbase's largest competitive threat?
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We think it's a very positive development when companies enter the crypto economy because we think it creates more innovation in the space, and we think that the TAM potential is kind of limitless here.
Sentiment: positive
On the more traditional side, there are companies like PayPal and Square and Robinhood and traditional financial institutions who are entering.
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And we believe that that's a huge validation of the whole space.
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In many cases, we're actually collaborating with those companies and exploring ways to partner.
Sentiment: positive
And we've talked about our differentiation point relative to those companies as being crypto-native.
Sentiment: positive
We can offer features and assets more scalably because we have a crypto-native bench.
Sentiment: positive
On the other side of the spectrum, you have lots of other crypto-native companies that are out there that we admire and their pace of innovation is kind of breathtaking.
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And we also view them, in many cases, as partners or collaborators, but also we look to them for inspiration in terms of what is resonating with crypto-native users.
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In many cases, those companies are not regulated and we can offer more usable, more regulated versions of those products to customers.
Sentiment: positive
Customers, as we talked about, choose us for trust, ease of use, safety and security of our services.
Sentiment: positive
I think that, ultimately, the way that you should think about Coinbase in this market is we are kind of the best of both worlds in terms of we are the regulated player, we are the trustworthy player that makes things as usable as possible for our many customers.
Sentiment: positive
And then we also are crypto-native, and we are able to offer many more assets and many more crypto-native features such as Staking, Rewards, Borrow, Earn, because of our exclusive focus on crypto.
Sentiment: positive
So we'll take one more question from today before going to some live questions from the analysts.
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Our last one here is from [Nova Y. and Jason M.] who asked about international plans.
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How do you think about the product and future road map internationally, notably across South Asia and South America?
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And additionally, Harshita Rawat from Sanford Bernstein asked if we could provide an update on recent launches in both Japan and Germany.
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Our platform is now available in more than 100 companies globally today, and this is very much consistent with our mission to increase economic freedom in the world.
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We believe, to fulfill that mission, we have to have as deep global and broad global reach as possible.
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So we're working to build products with a ship international by default mindset.
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Crypto is very global, so our product capabilities need to be as well.
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We obviously note that the adoption curve is different across different geographies, and so we're mindful of which features to scale where and when.
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And we look at a host of different signals in these different countries and regions, including GDP; crypto volumes, both fiat to crypto and crypto to crypto; currency stability; and we look actively to kind of pursue both M&A and partnerships to help accelerate our path into those different geographies.
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Alesia, do you want to talk about the latter part of that question?
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So thank you for the question on Japan and Germany.
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We had shared in our Q2 shareholder letter, that we have just received licenses in both of these markets, and so they were long-awaited launches for us.
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Just to pull back, it's difficult to enter regulated markets as you go through a long license application process with the regulators.
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So sometimes we don't know exactly when we will launch.
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As a result, when we launch in those countries, it is an MVP product.
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It's the first kind of foothold in a country.
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And so what we see in Q3 is we don't have a meaningful update to provide you in terms of those launches, but our goal is to develop very similar products in those markets that we have in the U.S., reduce customer friction, offer delightful onboarding experiences and customer [rails].
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And that's what we're building towards in those markets to really be able to then market and grow those customer pace.
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So not yet material, but we hope to have news in the coming quarters.
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So with that, we'll now transition and take a few live questions from our analysts.
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So Celine, I'll turn it over to you for the first question, please.
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(Operator Instructions) We have our first question coming from the line of Kenneth Worthington with JPMorgan.
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The cryptocurrency markets have had a nice move in recent months and recent weeks.
Sentiment: positive
Do you think that the drivers of this interest in the cryptocurrency markets and ecosystem today, and I think you guys mentioned Web3 a number of times in the prepared remarks, are different from the drivers that drove interest in the ecosystem late last year and even earlier this year?
Sentiment: positive
And maybe at a higher level, how is the interest in the ecosystem evolving for retail and corporate investors as cryptocurrencies evolve from the fringe towards more of the mainstream?
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I can share my high-level thinking on this.
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And then Alesia or Emilie, if you have any thoughts as well, please jump in.
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I mean so I think if you go back really 3, 4, 5 years, a lot of these cycles in crypto were more speculative in nature.
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People were buying it because this was now a scarce digital good and then they thought it would be valuable in the future.
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And there were some people using it for payments and things like that, but it wasn't the primary driver.
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What's exciting now -- and by the way, people would always ask me back then, this is like 2015, 2016, always asking me, "What is the use case going to be here," right?
Sentiment: positive
Luckily, nobody is really asking me that question anymore.
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I mean we're now seeing these tons of use cases where like NFTs and games, and you're seeing staking and borrowing and lending and Coinbase Card.
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And I think as Alesia shared at the beginning, I think almost half of our customers now, our active customers, are doing something other than trading crypto.
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So I would say that I would hesitate to speculate on what is driving momentum because I think we try to take a long-term view of this.
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And I'm a little bit less concerned about what's the recent rally or whatever.
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We're always trying to think a little bit longer term.
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But to me, the most important thing is how do we drive more people actually using crypto for more things.
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We're now seeing that in the numbers.
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And I have to imagine that that's driving a lot of this recent growth.
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It's becoming less of a speculative thing.
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So Alesia, Emilie, do you want to add?
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I would just connect the dots perhaps a little bit.
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When we see the growth of NFTs, that has great tailwind effect to then the Ethereum, blockchain, the Ethereum assets.
Sentiment: positive
And then we've seen new development on Solana, which then has benefits for those underlying protocols.
Sentiment: positive
And so I do think it's just the activity in headline and innovation that we're seeing that is driving a lot of the overall crypto market count growth.
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I think that's definitely the case on the retail side.
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And on institutional, what I think we're continuing to see is new types of institutional investors decide to make an allocation to crypto.
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And what we see there is an adoption curve that starts with Bitcoin, typically then moves to Ethereum but is quickly then picking up to other crypto assets.
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And we're seeing those investors looking for allocation to DeFi, finding ways that they can make that in the growing innovation of crypto broadly.
Sentiment: positive
So lots of different drivers, but it does feel different, as Brian said, that it feels less speculative and more driven by utility and broader adoption of crypto and in more traditional use cases.
Sentiment: positive
We have our next question coming from the line of Lisa Ellis with MoffettNathanson.
Sentiment: neutral
This quarter, we've seen the launch of crypto ETF in the U.S. Can you talk a bit about how ETFs are affecting Coinbase or may in the future?
Sentiment: positive
And I guess maybe the broader question is, can you elaborate a bit on how Coinbase is thinking about partnering versus competing with some of the traditional asset managers that's crypto investing mainstream?
Sentiment: negative
It is Alesia, maybe I'll start and then Brian and Emilie, feel free to add on.
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So first of all, we're actually all here cheering for the approval of the Bitcoin ETFs.
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And we think that it will benefit trading volumes just broadly in a crypto ecosystem and add to broader adoption as there are some institutions that don't have the ability to invest in underlying spot.
Sentiment: positive
That said, we think it's a different market.
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So crypto spot markets are 24/7 global.
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There's never a dull moment in them.
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But an ETF market obviously follows the traditional securities time line.
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And so it's not 24/7, and there'll be different traits that one can put on in each of those markets.
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So we think that they'll both attract different investors and different use cases.
Sentiment: positive
Obviously, the Bitcoin ETFs will also benefit the broader spot market, and we have the ability to provide custody solutions and are actively having conversations of how we can support the broader ETF adoption.
Sentiment: positive
And while our business today is entirely spot, we do have ambitions of launching a futures trading business in the future and apply for approval to do so in the U.S. So we're excited about the potential for that future growth of our own business as well.
Sentiment: positive
So in general, again, very positive.
Sentiment: positive
We're excited for the growth of the crypto economy and that will bring more users into the space.
Sentiment: positive
We have our next question coming from the line of Pete Christiansen with Citi.
Sentiment: neutral
Brian, I appreciate your color on the question regarding policy that, that doesn't necessarily have to be under a completely different umbrella but certainly a separate regulatory framework.
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But I guess how do you think about that in the context of having some cohesion with the traditional finance world on a regulatory front?
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I mean you have to get fiat dollars into crypto somehow.
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How are you thinking about a policy maybe should be formed around that notion?
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I mean so Coinbase is certainly acting as a bridge between the traditional financial system and this new cryptoeconomy.
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And so we often need to play in both worlds, right?
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For instance, we're custodying customer funds in U.S. dollars, and so we have money transmission licenses for that, as an example.
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I think this might be a good question that, Alesia, I don't know if you have any thoughts on it or Emilie, feel free to add more context if there's anything that you want to add to it.
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I'll jump in with a couple of thoughts, Pete.
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And I think our goal right now is to get all regulators focused on crypto.
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And the reason we would like that is that the technology is just so different.
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And so if you think about how the traditional financial services regulatory environment grew up around the need for financial intermediaries, banks, broker-dealers, to really facilitate the regulations and to maybe interface between regs and the customers, the technology can provide some of those services directly in crypto.
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And so we need to make sure that the regulation is in and around the common ground, yes, we don't want to have fraud.
Sentiment: neutral
We want to protect customers, but can technology solve that in those intermediaries, as an example.
Sentiment: positive
And so we think that having a single regulator really deeply understand the technology and then help frame what the new principles for financial regulation and crypto will look like will be helpful.
Sentiment: positive
But we also believe that there's going to be assets that are securities, and those crypto securities will be regulated by the SEC.
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There will be crypto commodities that will be regulated by the CFTC.
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And so there'll be things that fall under traditional financial services regulation.
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But there's a lot of things that are new that needs to be adopted.
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And so having that focus we think is valuable.
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I don't know if that helps kind of frame our views.
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I think there are some parts which are probably applicable in this new crypto economy.
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It's like, of course, we don't want fraud, we don't want scams, market structure rules are probably good.
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There's some rules that we're always questioning, does this actually make sense in the new crypto company because, as Alesia said, some of those intermediaries aren't there or it is a new technology paradigm.
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And so I think that's kind of the big, hard question in the room that a lot of regulators and policymakers are having to grapple with right now.
Sentiment: negative
And we're trying to be helpful, resource them, really do those -- some of these rules were created back in the '40s around orange groves and things.
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And it's like we're living in this new world of crypto economy, are these really relevant?
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Or is this actually holding back innovation?
Sentiment: negative
And so those are big questions to ask, maybe even above our pay grade a little bit, but I think they're important ones to ask.
Sentiment: neutral
We have our next question coming from the line of Will Nance with GS.
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Maybe just another question on the regulatory environment.
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I think Coinbase has always been thought of as one of the members of the crypto ecosystem that's been the most proactive with regulators with your approach to compliance.
Sentiment: positive
What are you seeing in conversations with regulators today?
Sentiment: neutral
And when you think about the kind of lack of clarity or the lack of a regulatory framework around crypto, as it relates to your ability to roll out new products, I mean what do you feel should be prioritized the most to kind of pull back on the reins a little bit and let you guys kind of be more free to roll out new products?
Sentiment: negative
Is there a pipeline of new products that you guys are most excited about, but that you can't proceed with until there's more regulatory clarity?
Sentiment: negative
I would say 90% of our interactions with regulators are really positive and constructive.
Sentiment: positive
And I generally feel like we're doing really well.
Sentiment: positive
We try to reach out proactively with everybody before we launch products well in advance and kind of give them a heads-up.
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And usually, that worked out pretty well.
Sentiment: positive
But 1 out of 10 times, when we see some kind of bad policy that's proposed and we feel like we have a responsibility to speak up and kind of for the industry as the largest player in the U.S. and push back on it where needed, but our default is really just to proactively engage.
Sentiment: negative
And I think the vast majority of the time, the regulators that we interact with are really thoughtful people and with mutual respect and we're just really trying to achieve the same outcome, same goals, which is consumer protection and fair market.
Sentiment: positive
There certainly have been times where we felt like we've wanted to launch a product and we've gotten kind of a different answer at the last minute about whether we were allowed to roll that out.
Sentiment: negative
And that's really tough on the team at Coinbase that have put a lot of time into building these things.
Sentiment: negative
But this is a fast-moving space.
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We understand that these are complicated issues.
Sentiment: negative
So it's not always a simple answer.
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Frankly, the regulators don't always have the resources to go meet with every single company in the crypto space.
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There's thousands of these start-ups now.
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We sometimes get more scrutiny.
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Sometimes competitors have had something out there in the market for 2 years, and then we aren't able to launch it suddenly at the last minute, it doesn't feel like that's actually creating a fair market, a level playing field.
Sentiment: negative
So we try to avoid things like that, but I also understand why it happens.
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The regulators can't meet with every single company in crypto.
Sentiment: neutral
We have our last question coming from the line of Rich Repetto with Piper Sandler.
Sentiment: neutral
The blockchain rewards revenue doubled, quadrupled, really drove the subscription revenue.
Sentiment: positive
So I guess I'm trying to understand, what is sort of runway of where can it go going forward?
Sentiment: neutral
And I know you have Staking and Ethereum, but what do you expect?
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Can you continue to grow at it?
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And at what type of pace given the great results you've had here in the last couple of quarters?
Sentiment: positive
Thanks, Rich, for the question.
Sentiment: neutral
I'm going to restate it just because your audio was a little choppy.
Sentiment: neutral
So what I think your question was we've seen significant growth in our blockchain rewards revenue that grew meaningfully quarter-over-quarter and you're asking about what the trajectory is.
Sentiment: positive
Can you just confirm that I understood the question?
Sentiment: neutral
We're really excited about the growth of blockchain rewards, which is predominantly Ethereum staking revenue today.
Sentiment: positive
And the growth here is really around the growth of overall proof of stake networks and the growth of crypto overall.
Sentiment: positive
So one is we're going to add more proof of stake networks and offer staking and more assets on our platform.
Sentiment: neutral
Two is we continue to have a waitlist for Ethereum staking and for the existing staking offer, and so we're continuing to roll that out and bring more users into the staking assets that we do provide.
Sentiment: positive
And so we have existing runway with those assets.
Sentiment: positive
And those are going to be the 2 significant drivers of that growth.
Sentiment: positive
But we believe that this is the direction the industry is growing.
Sentiment: positive
Brian, I don't know if you want to comment on proof of stake networks and the overall industry view.
Sentiment: neutral
No, I think proof of stake is going to continue to grow.
Sentiment: positive
And I think staking rewards awards, these blockchain rewards as we call them, I think, will be an important growth area for us in the future.
Sentiment: positive
Yes, I believe at this point, Coinbase is the largest Ethereum 2 staker, for instance, which is really great.
Sentiment: positive
Emilie, anything else you want to add on this before we wrap up?
Sentiment: neutral
I think it's a big source of innovation.
Sentiment: positive
This goes back to one of the other questions about what is driving kind of the activity in the ecosystem, and I think it comes back to this.
Sentiment: neutral
And so we're pretty bullish on the potential for this, both as just helping the ecosystem as well as being an important source of subscription revenue for us.
Sentiment: positive
Thank you, Brian, Emilie, Alesia, and thank you all for joining us today.
Sentiment: neutral
We look forward to speaking with you again on the next call.
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Good morning, My name is Chris lien and I'm, the CEO of Marin software and chairman of this annual meeting of stockholders, which I now call to order.
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Attending this virtual meeting with US today are members of our board of directors members of the company's executive team and Representatives from Grant Thornton the company's independent registered public accounting firm.
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We're excited to be hosting our sixth virtual meeting.
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Youll be able to follow along and vote electronically on the virtual meeting website. If you have not done so already.
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Mike Coleman, our general Counsel has been appointed Secretary of this meeting to record the minutes.
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Jean Wood, representing Broadridge financial solutions has been appointed to act as the Inspector of elections for this meeting.
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She has executed an oath of inspector of elections to execute her duties with strict impartiality we.
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We will file this oath with the records of the meeting.
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The Secretary will now report on the notice for this meeting.
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