Why Coinbase's $100B+ valuation makes sense, and how to compare it to $60B Ethereum DeFi, and to crypto-king Binance

Hi Fintech futurists --

This week, we look at:

• There are two very large revenue pools in the crypto asset class — (1) mining, and (2) trading. There are some large revenue pools in crypto-as-a-software, too, but those tend to be less sensational.
• This analysis will establish a 2021 baseline for the most regulated of crypto exchanges, Coinbase, including a detailed financial model building a $100B+ valuation case
• We then consider the valuations and multiples of capital markets protocols in Decentralized Finance of Ethereum, now making up over $60B in token value
• Lastly, we look at Binance’s $1B in profits, its $35B BNB token, and the activities on Binance Smart Chain

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Long Take on Coinbase as a $100B+ company

So last time we talked about Coinbase, we gave it a $15 billion valuation. Maybe it was “right at the time”, but it was fairly wrong given where things are going now. Today’s Coinbase private valuation is floating between $50 billion and $100 billion in the private secondary markets on Nasdaq. That distance made us revisit the financial model for the company with a February update.

The core drivers that changed are as follows:

• The last quarter generated $600 million in revenue, which was as much as the first three quarters combined. So we think 2020YE was somewhere around the $1.2+ billion range, and the company is annualizing at over $2 billion.
• The price of the core crypto assets doubled, doubled, and then doubled again. When BTC is at $60,000 and ETH is at $2,000, Coinbase has a symmetrically large increase in its core business. Reminder that in July, BTC was at $7,000. As a result, cumulative trading volumes jumped to $450 billion from $200 billion.
• Institutional money has arrived, and the world’s richest man is Elon Musk and not Warren Buffett. Elon has chipped in $1.5 billion and Coinbase’s institutional custody and prime brokerage business has become 50% of their $90 billion under custody.

In 2017, Coinbase nearly hit $1 billion in revenue. The year before, it did between $10 and $20 million.

Working backwards through the numbers, we saw that this was in large part driven by asset appreciation and massive surge in retail interest. How do you predict when that happens again?! You can literally be working in the heart of the crypto ecosystem, and not see it coming 3 months before it actually materializes.

We can project out continued moderately-aggressive growth in the crypto asset class, and see large increases in the Coinbase revenue base. While a lot of that will come from retail, we expect an increasing amount of prime brokerage business to start yielding results on the institutional side — perhaps generating $250-500 million in fees. While the assets under custody are roughly the same according to a year-end report from the company, the pricing on the two differs substantially.

Here is a simple print of the valuation history. We also project forward a 2021 valuation based on the revenue estimate in the chart above. Underneath, we also show a metric for Revenue per User, Valuation per User, and the Valuation/Revenue multiple.

What can we learn?

Coinbase has floated around between a 20x and 50x multiple depending on the year of operation. In 2021, we expect that multiple to be towards the higher end of the spectrum. And yet, how much and how fast can we expect companies with a $100 billion valuation to grow? This is a conundrum. Second, we see revenue per user at about $50 at 43 million users. This is a fantastic feat. The ability to continue to extract these numbers depends on market volatility, of course. Last, we note that the implied $2,600 valuation per user metric feels quite high relative to the rest of the neobanks, who sit at $500 to $1,000 per user.

But who knows. We quote again from the ARK Invest Big Ideas report that a digital wallet user, or alternately a fintech bundle user, could be a $20,000 annual revenue customer.

If you want to play with the numbers, grab the model here.

We are excited about seeing Coinbase’s real economics, as everything here is just a guesstimate. The direct listing will create a wave of crypto entrepreneurs and investors that will continue driving interest and creativity in the space.

The next set of developments that the Coinbase-mafia will fund, can already be figured out by looking at the company’s portfolio activities. Those roughly fall into Web3 (i.e., blockchain-anchored web, DeFi, developer tools, and regulatory tools). With that, let’s turn to Coinbase’s existential competition.

DeFi as a $60 Billion Sector

Decentralized Finance is not without its metrics. For the data-curious, you can figure out the amount of total-value-locked (TVL, collateralized assets), revenue from particular protocols, the directions of various cashflows, and other financial metrics. We recommend Token Terminal, DeFi Pulse, and Messari for the analysis.

Above you can see a comp list that includes Uniswap, Sushiswap, Balancer, and Curve. Those DeFi protocols are the most like Coinbase in providing trading and market making functionalities directly on the Ethereum mainnet. The Ethereum computer executes the code that competes with Coinbase. We could also, for argument, look at Compound, Aave, or Cream as the prime brokerage competitors. Those protocols provide leverage and transform various risks into other risks. But this is a smaller part of Coinbase’s business, so let’s put it aside for the moment.

Uniswap is running at $1.2 billion in annualized revenues, and at the time of making the chart was worth $6 billion in token market value. It is now at $7 billion — this is the problem of doing analysis in crypto using Excel. Uniswap’s volume of $100 billion runs a bit behind Coinbase’s $450 billion; but honestly that is a difference of timing and not an order of magnitude. If we were Coinbase, we would be a bit bothered.

Note also the difference in valuation — $100 billion vs <$10 billion. This is in part is, we think, a discount on what UNI, the protocol governance token, really represents. If it were a security for shareholders, it should absolutely be worth 50x rather than 5x on revenue. But that ownership is held by VCs after an $11 million fund raise, so time will tell on how the value accrual will flow between the equity and the token.

Notably, the prime brokerage / leverage markets protocols do trade at higher multiples — looking more like the 50x discussed.

One way to understand this is to say that expected growth is higher in the laggards than in the leaders. Another way to look at it is to say that revenue generation actually doesn’t matter, and it is engagement and usage that does. The simple measure of that is TVL, on the basis of which all DeFi protocols are more similarly priced, and float between 1x to 3x.

All that said, DeFi is now in the same league as Coinbase, with the various protocol tokens adding up to $60 billion.

Binance can be the new Ant Financial at $200 Billion

If Coinbase is some sort of crypto Superman, Binance is the shadowy Batman; or perhaps Coinbase is the Wonder Woman to Binance’s Catwoman. You get the idea. We’re nerds.

Binance is deeply impressive in its execution on multiple fronts. As a centralized exchange founded in 2017, Binance has the survival instincts of a company that has survived multiple “interactions” with Chinese attempts to shut down Bitcoin trading in the country. It is multi-jurisdictional, holding redundant licenses across the long tail of small countries willing to grant it the equivalent of economic asylum. It is also aggressively inclusive, having a reputation for the widest selection of assets and a lightning quick propensity for execution. Perhaps Binance is the Flash, or Quicksilver, then.

On top of that, it was the main exchange that launched an exchange token that mattered — BNB. And it did the launch when ICOs were starting to sour. The token made promises of future features, and functioned largely like a referral mechanism for affiliate trading fees. This catapulted Binance into volume that would make Coinbase blush. Below, for example, is the latest comparison, with Binance’s 24 hour volume at $33 billion and Coinbase Pro at $4.2 billion.

Here are the key 2020 numbers. Look, $3.88 billion in average daily trading volume, times 365 days in a crypto year, is $1.4 trillion in volume. Naively, that’s about 3-5x where Coinbase is today. With the lowest trading fees of a 0.1% spread, we are looking at $1.5 billion to $5 billion in revenue for the company. That ignores all the revenues from its derivatives footprint and a variety of other revenue sources. 2020 profits will be in the $800 million to $1 billion range.

Now, just because Binance is crushing it, doesn’t mean Coinbase isn’t crushing it.

For more analysis parsing 12 frontier technology developments every week, a podcast conversation on operating fintechs, and novel food-for-thought essays, become a Blueprint member below.