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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Brian Armstrong, founder of Coinbase, photographed for Forbes by Jamel Toppin in January 2020.Jamel Toppin/The Forbes CollectionThere was a time when Amazon Web Services (AWS) was just an afterthought for the Seattle-based company, overshadowed by Amazon’s gargantuan e-commerce business. Fast forward to today, and the Amazon subsidiary, which launched almost 20 years ago, is now the $1.8 trillion company’s main profit engine. In 2020, AWS delivered $13.5 billion in annual operating profits, good for 63% of the parent company’s total, on a revenue base of $45.3 billion.U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase is hoping to follow in these footsteps with its own infrastructure product, Coinbase Cloud. “We want to be the AWS of crypto,” said Coinbase chief product officer Surojit Chatterjee in an exclusive interview with Forbes. “We are building this whole Coinbase Cloud suite of products that you can think of as crypto computing services, to help developers build their applications faster.”Coinbase executives will be the first to tell you that it needs to get here sooner rather than later. For all of the accolades received by Coinbase for not only being the first major crypto firm to go public, but also for doing so via the largest direct listing in history, its revenue base is overly reliant on transaction fees (+90%). When the company went public, the figure was around 97%. This level of revenue concentration in a single line-item is typically reserved for major technology platforms such as Facebook or Google, which almost solely rely on advertising to drive profits.But for the crypto giant, or any other exchange, such dependence can be a major vulnerability because trading volumes are highly correlated with market volatility. When the crypto market hit a lull in the third quarter this year, Coinbase’s trading volume and revenue fell 29% and 39% respectively. The company
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