Coinbase announced Q4 results and an Ethereum Layer 2 solution. Blur is claiming market share from OpenSea in NFT trading. Bitget has become one of the most popular crypto exchanges. Solana’s blockchain was down again. Divly is a recommended tax app for crypto investors.
Coinbase Q4 Results, Base and BUSD
Coinbase is currently the only crypto exchange that is also a publicly listed company. Coinbase’s stock (ticker: COIN) has been publicly traded for a little less than two years. Due to its status, the company must publish the key figures of its operations after every quarter.
We’ve been following Coinbase’s reports since the company was listed on Nasdaq and quarterly reports became public. They are interesting to read, as the numbers describe the current state of the entire crypto market. Coinbase published its 2022 Q4 report a week ago.
The table below shows the company’s net revenue by sector.
Coinbase’s net revenue was slightly higher compared to the previous quarter. This is thanks to the Interest Income line, which grew by almost 80 percent. This means Coinbase made 30 percent of its profits by collecting interest on fiat deposits. Coinbase can thank the Fed for this revenue because the US central bank has been hiking interest rates to unexpectedly high levels.
Overall, however, Coinbase’s result was $557 million negative. The result was almost identical to the third quarter (545 million). The year 2022 brought total losses of 2.6 billion dollars to the company.
A change was also seen in the trading activity of the customers. During Q3, Ethereum surpassed Bitcoin in trading volume for the first time. During Q4, Bitcoin (35%) again surpassed Ethereum (33%). This was due to the bottom of the bear market that took place in Q4. The more uncertain the market is, the more investors seek refuge in Bitcoin.
Coinbase also announced last week that it will launch its own Ethereum Layer 2 called Base!
1/ 🔵 We’re excited to announce @BuildOnBase.
Base is an Ethereum L2 that offers a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly way for anyone, anywhere, to build decentralized apps.
Our goal with Base is to make onchain the next online and onboard 1B+ users into the cryptoeconomy. pic.twitter.com/RmwZFJzGGs
— Coinbase (@coinbase) February 23, 2023
Base is built with OP Stack, which is an open-source code library. Ethereum Layer 2 Optimism has also been built with it. Despite the cooperation between Optimism and Coinbase, Base also competes (at least in theory) with Optimism and other Layer 2 projects.
It is important to note that Coinbase does not launch its own token on Base, so transaction fees are paid with Ether. Many analysts see Base as a really significant thing, but at this early stage, it is difficult to assess the impact on Coinbase. We’ll follow the development of Base with great interest.
There is also news related to the BUSD stablecoin. Two weeks ago, we reported on the SEC’s attack on Paxos, the company behind the BUSD (Binance USD) stablecoin. As a result of the attack, Paxos will have to run BUSD down within the next year.
Coinbase made an official announcement yesterday that it will remove BUSD from trading in two weeks. The news certainly did not come as a surprise to anyone. BUSD’s market cap has halved in three months, from around $23.3 billion to $10.6 billion.
Blur challenges OpenSea in NFT trading
There has been significant news from the NFT world in February. At the center of the events is an NFT marketplace called Blur. It’s a platform that opened already in 2022, but Blur made headlines this month due to an airdrop worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Blur has challenged the market leader OpenSea since its launch by offering trading without commissions. Blue rewarded the most active users in February with a massive airdrop of BLUR token, and a new airdrop worth $300 million is coming soon.
300M+ BLUR will be distributed to the community in Season 2.
What’s the secret to maximizing rewards? Loyalty.
Users with 100% loyalty have the highest chances of Mythical Care Packages, which are worth 100x Uncommon Care Packages.
Here are 3 ways to maximize your loyalty👇 pic.twitter.com/Cgiemrvpxh
— Blur (@blur_io) February 21, 2023
New airdrops and bonuses act as an incentive to trade on the Blur platform – in addition to zero costs. The more you trade, the bigger airdrop you will get in the future.
According to the dappradar website, Blur has generated a trading volume of $1.2 billion in the previous 30 days. OpeaSea’s trading volume is 439 million for the same period. This is slightly more than a third of Blur’s volume.
The new challenger has squeezed OpenSea so tight that the market leader had to give up its 2.5 percent trading fee, at least for the time being. OpenSea earned more than $300 million from trading fees last year, so this is a major issue.
The entry of the Blur platform has increased the popularity of NFTs. Bitcoin’s Ordinals protocol, which we have mentioned in previous news reports, has also contributed to the boom. It allows NFT images to be deposited into the Bitcoin blockchain.
Bitget has become one of the top crypto exchanges
In 2022, we received nothing but negative news regarding crypto exchanges. Everyone remembers the massive bankruptcies that culminated in the collapse of the FTX in November. New and interesting exchanges haven’t really hit the market. Until now. Bitget has changed this trend and brought something fresh to the exchange market.
Bitget was founded already in 2018, but the popularity of the exchange started to rise sharply after the fall of FTX. There are a few good reasons why this has happened, the first of which is Proof of Reserves.
Professional traders in particular have demanded certificates of customer funds after the FTX exchange went down. Bitget was one of the first crypto exchanges to publish a PoR. Its reserve status is also more than 200 percent. There is even a separate Protection Fund for customers worth $300 million.
Bitget is targeting active and professional traders. The fall of FTX created an empty space in the market, which Bitget has managed to fill. Bitget has already become a top 5 derivatives exchange, and some think it even belongs in the top 3. Bitget’s biggest competitors are Binance, KuCoin, ByBit, and Deribit.
Bitget also did an extensive advertising campaign at the FIFA World Cup. The company is the official partner of soccer star Leo Messi and Serie A club Juventus. This visibility has contributed to Bitget’s popularity.
We also familiarized ourselves with Bitget at the beginning of 2023. Last week, we published a comprehensive Bitget beginner’s guide, which goes through the most important features of the exchange. If you are interested in a huge altcoin selection, low costs, and more than a hundred trading pairs in futures, then Bitget is worth checking out.
Bitget also advertises itself as the largest crypto CopyTrader platform on the market. CopyTrader is a feature introduced by eToro, where you can follow investors who make good results by copying their trades.
Solana blockchain was down for 20 hours
Solana’s difficulties don’t seem to end. The project, which was titled Ethereum killer in 2021, has already suffered from blockchain outages for two years. On top of that, Solana received a lot of financial support from FTX and Alameda, which is now gone.
It’s frankly a small miracle that Solana is still at number 11 in the cryptocurrency ranking. Thanks for this goes to the price rally seen at the beginning of January. The future of the project still looks uncertain, though. It doesn’t help that Solana’s blockchain suffered another long outage.
Solana was down for 20 hours last Saturday. On top of all that, the Solana Foundation, which guides Solana’s development work, still does not know the cause of the problem. The Twitter handle @DBCrypt0 has published his own take on the matter, which has gained a lot of popularity.
1/Yesterday #Solana had another 20 hour outage 🤯
Just one of about a dozen times the ⛓️ has gone down. But why? 🤔
All part of a massive design flaw that I will try to break down in this 🧵
So let’s get into it… pic.twitter.com/KmeUPnnlZJ
— DBCryptoX ⚡️ (@DBCrypt0) February 26, 2023
According to DBCrypt0, Solana’s infrastructure has a massive problem because the network’s validators form consensus by communicating via Solana’s blockchain. In other words, about 90 percent of Solana’s ~4,000 daily transactions are messages from validators to each other.
This puts a load on the blockchain and introduces another problem. If the Solana blockchain gets stuck for one reason or another, validators will not be able to communicate. Because of this, problems have had to be solved on the Discord channel.
It was yet another stain on Solana’s reputation. “Solana is like a lifestyle-friendly blockchain because you can have nights and weekends off.” This is how Twitter user Paul Brody aptly commented on the topic.
The Solana price was surprisingly little affected by the news. The SOL token fell by just five percent on Saturday. Solana’s price is currently just over $22, which is about 170 percent higher than the bottom of the bear market reached at the end of December.
AboutBitcoin.io to cooperate with Divly tax software
There are two things that take place in the spring: the sun comes out and everyone must do their taxes. It’s that time of the year again when every investor has to wade through crypto transactions and calculate the capital gains from the previous tax year.
Every active investor has noticed that you can’t get very far with pen and paper or Excel. If you make even a couple of dozen sales a year, you should use separate tax software. They calculate losses and profits for you when you import transactions and trades in the software.
AboutBitcoin.io has started cooperation with Divly tax software. We recommend this software to all cryptocurrency investors.
Check out Divly from this link
Use the code BITCOINKESKUS23 when ordering, and you get a 15% discount!
Divly supports more than 100 exchanges, more than 10 countries, and over 7000 currencies. The interface is very informative and easy to use. Divly is also a great option for Scandinavian investors because the software has customized tax reports for each of the Nordic countries.
Divly is also in talks with local exchanges for adding more support. For example, the reports of the Finnish crypto exchanges Coinmotion and Northcrypto are supported by Divly. If your favorite local exchange is not supported yet, you can contact Divly and ask them to add that. In the meanwhile, you can input transactions manually as well.