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A single customer could have 5 billion dollars of bitcoin. Xapo, a competing company in that space, holds 15% of all bitcoins in circulation!
by conanbatt 6y ago
A single customer could have 5 billion dollars of bitcoin. Xapo, a competing company in that space, holds 15% of all bitcoins in circulation!
- beaner 6y agoCoinbase actually owns Xapo's custody business, they bought it in August 2019 [0]. An amount like $5b would likely pay less than 10 bips (0.1%) per year in custody fees, or $5m/year. Coinbase Pro's volume has recently been doing up to a few million dollars in revenue per day - and that's not even counting the higher brokerage fees that apply on top of some of that volume. Custody is certainly an important part of the business. But I think brokerage currently accounts for a much larger % of revenue. Custody will become bigger as the price of crypto grows. [0] https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-exchange-coinbase-acquires-xapos-institutional-custody-business https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-exchange-coinbase-acquires-x...
- conanbatt 6y agoGood back of the envelope math. 0.1% of 15% of circulation is around 60 million. Big but not as big as trading. I'm sure there's some vertical integration considerations here: the people that hold this amount of assets also trade, and probably trade at OTC with very special requirements that make them valuable.