2017 has been a phenomenal year for crypto investors and so for the popular U.S-based cryptocurrency exchange ‘Coinbase’. Last year, as the cryptocurrency craze was at peak high the cryptocurrency exchange witnessed a massive inrush of investors signing up on its platform.
As reported by Recode earlier this week, Coinbase has registered a whopping $1 billion revenue last year in 2017. The report shows that Coinbase has beat its estimated target revenue of $600 million by a whopping 66 percent higher.
The majority of investors rushed into the crypto markets during the last two months of 2017, as Bitcoin futures contracts sparked a wild upswing. From early November to mid-December 2017, investors heavily favored Bitcoin, which drove an unprecedented rally in altcoins like Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, and others.
During this time, Coinbase saw registrations soar to record highs, with an average of 100,000 users signing up on the platform each day. Reports indicate that Coinbase registered over 13 million users last year. At the peak of the crypto craze, the exchange crashed on several occasions due to a massive surge in demand from crypto investors.
Strategic Growth and Investor Interest in Coinbase
Founded in 2012, Coinbase has emerged as one of the most preferred exchanges offering wallet services to cryptocurrency holders. It earns most of its revenue from trades conducted on its GDAX exchange and from fees charged for fiat-to-crypto conversions and vice versa.
In a bid to increase its customer services and engineering teams and expand its horizon of business further to New York, Coinbase managed to raise $100 million in series D funding last year in August 2017.
Having seen the success of the company later, many venture capitalists and private and seeking ways to get the shares of the company. Many investors who missed out on the funding opportunity, are now reportedly enticing existing shareholders to part ways with their lucrative holdings.
However, Coinbase has strictly asked its investor to refrain from selling their shares to outside parties as this would mean the breach of a policy. In a statement to Recode, Coinbase said:“As a private company, Coinbase does not allow trading of stock on secondary markets for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there is not full and equal information available to the market. We will take appropriate action if we find people have sold Coinbase shares in violation of our agreements not to do so.