Transaction expense eats 24% of their revenue ($278M). Sales and marketing eats 17% ($200M). Technology and development eats $571M. General and Administrative e

Transaction expense eats 24% of their revenue ($278M). Sales and marketing eats 17% ($200M). Technology and development eats $571M. General and Administrative eats $414M. Other expenses eats $259M. In total, $1.721B in operating expenses. They have nearly 5,000 employees. As axg11 noted, they're building lots of new things. As I noted in another comment, they probably need to step up their marketing given how Crypto.com and FTX are saturating sports with their names. If you're trying to grow a new platform with ever-changing things customers want while managing over $20B and have 9.2M monthly transacting users, it's going to cost a bunch. Could they be more efficient? Maybe. However, being more efficient might mean missing out on the Next Big Thing. One could argue an "efficient" company wouldn't have created Coinbase in the first place - a company catering to some upstart electronic token nonsense when they could be putting their energy into something people want. And in 2014/2015 it looks like Bitcoin didn't do anything amazing (Coinbase was founded in 2012, but my BTC-USD chart only goes back to 2014). It was late-2017 when we saw the spike to $19,000 and 2020 was really the first year it stayed over $10k most of the time. So they need to spend a decent amount on R&D to basically make sure what they're doing is still the next big thing. If you just wanted to create a company making money, you could start a bank. Coinbase is trying to be a future of finance and investing - and no matter how much you believe in crypto, you don't know exactly what that future is. Coinbase needs to make sure they have a finger in every little pie and that costs money.