Coinbase has reported a 75% drop in year-on-year revenue for Q4 2022 alongside $557 million losses as user numbers continue to fall.
The $629m revenue for the period was, however, ahead of market expectations.
In Q4 2021, Coinbase generated net profit of $840m at the peak of crypto adoption. The crypto winter has bitten hard since that time, with 18% of its staff cut in 2022 then 20% laid off last month.
Its 8.3m monthly transacting users were down 200,000 compared with Q3 2022, while trading volume fell 9% from the previous quarter to $145 billion and transaction revenue fell 12% to $322m.
Coinbase’s bid to diversify revenue streams away from solely trading fees saw success, with more than $200m generated from staking, earn and custody services in the quarter.
Meanwhile the company has reported a cyberattack which saw employee data stolen.
After text messages were sent to employees, one clicked on the included link, providing the attackers with login details. While Coinbase’s systems defended against the breach, the attackers rang the vulnerable employee, pretending to be from the IT department, and through them accessed contact information of Coinbase workers.
After 10 minutes the security team noticed the unusual activity and contacted the employee, ending contact with the attackers.
Coinbase says it believes the attack was led by 0ktapus, which last year targeted Twilio and Cloudflare among other major companies. This saw nearly 10,000 accounts compromised across 130 organisations.
Cryptocurrency shorts
Polygon Labs has laid off 100 employees, or nearly 20% of its workforce. Employees will receive three months of severance pay, regardless of their level or length of service.
ConsenSys has acquired HAL, a no-code blockchain development tooling platform that helps individuals and organisations query and automate blockchain data. HAL will extend the capabilities of the former’s Infura Web3 API provider platform.
Sentio has raised $6.4m led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to provide monitoring, alerting and log management to decentralised applications.
Curio Research, building Web3 games powered entirely by smart contracts, has raised $2.9m seed funding led by Bain Capital Crypto. Its first game, Treaty, allows players to write and deploy smart contracts – Treaties – which allows them to draft rules around how they interact with other players in the game.
Sending Labs has secured $12.5m seed funding to build a Web3 communication stack. Insignia Venture Partners, MindWorks Capital, and Signum Capital led the round.
Strider, founded by executives from EA, Rockstar and Jam City, has raised $5.5m seed funding to build a platform to revolutionise how new IP is developed and owned within games. The round was co-led by Makers Fund and Fabric Ventures.
Azra Games has announced a $10m funding round led by A16z Crypto. Azra is building a game based on the Legions and Legends NFT collection.
German engineering and tech giant Bosch has launched Fetch.ai Foundation with crypto protocol Fetch.ai to develop Web3 technologies focused on real-world use cases including mobility, industry and consumers.
Crypto prices
The overall market cap of the 22,600 coins is at $1.09 trillion at the time of writing (7am UK), a 3.7% decrease in the last 24 hours.
For round-ups of recent cryptocurrency news developments, click here.
For valuations of the top 100 coins by market cap in US dollars, plus 24-hour price change, see below.