If Coinbase is worth $100 billion, what’s a fair valuation for Stripe?

Published February 22, 2021

Mere days after we discussed Coinbase at $77 billion and Stripe at $115 billion in the private markets, those same semi-liquid exchanges have provided a new valuation for the cryptocurrency company. It’s now $100 billion, per Axios’ reporting.

Good thing we argued last week that there could be some merit to Coinbase’s $77 billion secondary market valuation from a particular perspective. We’d look silly today if we’d mocked the $77 billion figure only for it to go up by about a third in just a few days.

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Luckily for us, Axios also got its hands on a few numbers regarding Coinbase’s 2019 and 2020 financial performance, so we can get into all sorts of trouble this morning. We’ll look at the data, which stretches to the end of Q3 2020, and then do some creative extrapolating into Q1 2021 to decide whether Coinbase at $100 billion makes no sense, a little sense or perfect sense.

As always, we’re riffing, not giving investment advice. So read on if you want to noodle on Coinbase with me; its impending direct listing will be one of the year’s most watched financial events.

We’ll drag Stripe back in at the end. Given that the companies now nearly share private-market valuations, we’d be remiss to not unfairly stack them against one another. Into the breach!

Coinbase @ $100B

Axios’ Dan Primack, a good egg in my experience, got the goods on Coinbase’s historical performance. Summarizing the bits we need, here’s what the crypto exchange got up to recently:

Coinbase 2019: $530 million in revenues, $30 million in net losses.
Coinbase 2020 Q1-Q3: $691 million in revenues, $141 million in net income.

It’s simple to take the 2020 data that we have and extrapolate it into full-year data. Indeed, you get revenues of $921.33 million and net income of $188 million. Compared to its 2019 data, Coinbase would have managed around 74% growth while swinging steeply into the profitable domain.

That’s a killer year. But it’s actually a bit better than we are giving Coinbase credit for. Poking around volume data compiled by Bitcoinity.org, Coinbase had its biggest period of 2020 in terms of bitcoin trading volume in the fourth quarter. Thinking about Coinbase’s 2020 from a trading perspective using the same dataset, it had a great Q1, more staid Q2 and Q3, and a blockbuster Q4 that ramped to record highs at the end.