Coinbase Global, Inc. (COIN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Thank you, everyone, for joining today. Before we begin, the company has asked me to read the following safe harbor statement. So I'd like to remind everyone that during today's chat, Emilie may make forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from today's statements. Information concerning risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause results to differ from these forward-looking statements is included in the company's SEC filings and shareholder letter available on Coinbase's Investor Relations website. Our discussion today will also include references to non-GAAP metrics. A reconciliation of non-GAAP metrics is included in the company's most recent shareholder letter. My name is Will Nance. I cover payments and digital assets here at Goldman. And joining us today, we're delighted to have Emilie Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer of Coinbase. Here in person today to discuss the business and the crypto space more broadly. Emilie has been with the company since 2018. Has also served as Vice President of Business and Data at Coinbase prior to being named COO. Prior to that, Emilie was an executive at LinkedIn. Please join me today in welcoming Emilie. Emilie, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

Yes. Maybe before we get into it, I think for some of the investors in the room who haven't had the chance to meet with you, could you maybe talk about what brought you to Coinbase and what your experience has been at the company so far?

Sure. So I've been in tech most of my career. And frankly, was always kind of on the more conservative side of tech. LinkedIn, I think, is a very kind of noteworthy company, but it's very predictable. It's a SaaS company, and I joined LinkedIn in 2009. At the end of 2009, I had worked with Jeff Weiner, the CEO early in my career at Yahoo. And I've always kind of been drawn to just really smart people. I feel like my 1 super power in life is that I just can like kind of sense the smart person in the room and I just want to like to work with them. And I was -- I kind of was getting bored at LinkedIn and felt like I wanted to take advantage of a new opportunity. And I had heard a lot about crypto, and I was interested in it, but I wasn't an expert by any means. And I met Brian Armstrong because Coinbase was looking for a head of corp dev, my whole has been M&A. And I still remember today, it was like a rainy day in San Francisco. We were supposed to take a walk. It was too rainy. We were crammed in this little conference room. And I got chilled on my spine because I just knew he was talking about the future. He was talking about crypto as a new form of money, as a new form of financial system, as a new form of app store. And I was like, okay, this is actually very intimidating, but like I have to be a part of it in some way. And so I joined the company in March 2018. It was an interesting time to join. I signed my offer letter in December '17. If anybody knows how Bitcoin looked at that point, I basically signed at the top and then worked my way to the bottom. And it was just actually a great time for me to join because I kind of learned the hardship and the ups and downs of crypto as I joined, and it's been an incredible experience. I started running the business team, took on data, took on some other parts of the organization. And then got promoted to COO and President. And so it's been an incredible experience for me.

That's great. I mean there's clearly a lot going on at Coinbase. Could you talk a little bit about how you and Brian divide up the responsibilities and kind of the day-to-day and maybe what just excites you most to get out of bed every day?

Yes. So Brian as a visionary. He talks about the future all the time. That's what excites him and motivates him. So he thinks about the future, and he runs product and engineering, that's what he loves. He loves technology. And I basically run the rest of the organization, which is everything operational. Marketing, business, customer support and the people organization, legal, et cetera. And so I feel like my whole job here is to make sure that I can help product and engineering ship as quickly as possible whatever products we think our customers want. And I think that our relationship works really well because we just have different areas of expertise. So again, Brian loves his big ideas and sometimes he'll come up with these ideas. And I'm like, what? Even something like remote first. The idea of going remote first was something that I thought was completely crazy because my whole career has been about -- you'd always be work in person and everything like that. And so he comes up with these ideas and then I kind of think about them and think about how I can help him operationalize them. So that's our relationship. Every day, I'm genuinely excited to get out of bed because I feel like we're changing the world. Like I just feel like we're doing things that nobody has ever tackled before. I loved my time at the other companies I worked at, but it was like squeezing every little cent out of every ARPU or whatever. And you're like, okay, that can move the needle like this much. Where is this? I feel like we're talking about just TAMs that we haven't even thought of yet and could be trillions of dollars. And so I just -- I feel like it's just a super extensive market opportunity, and it's very invigorating to work at Coinbase.

And I guess the company went public about 7 months ago now. What have been the changes internally? And what's changed versus when you were a private company?

I feel like we were kind of operating as a public company even when we were private. -- So -- and one of the things we do is like we have like all these rules, like we're not allowed to look at the stock price. We've made that a cultural tenant because we're not going to get overly hung up on how things look during a volatile period, for example. But I think the biggest change, honestly, is just that like we have the quarterly rigor of the earnings calls and thinking about how this fits into a quarterly cadence. For me, it feels like just a natural part of what we were already doing. So it hasn't changed that much.

Got it. I guess one of the questions we get a lot from investors is whether the market fully appreciates the venture arm of the business. And I think you pinned a blog post talking about your role in creating that. Could you just kind of talk about that a little bit and maybe talk about the asset from a strategic perspective?

Yes. So -- and just for context, like, when I was a very junior analyst in my career, I got to work on the Alibaba investment at Yahoo!. And so I have this -- and I was also on the Naspers Board for many years. So I think that strategic investments are actually quite important especially if you have, I think, a competitive advantage by knowing a certain market or players in a market. And so when I first joined Coinbase, I said to Brian, I'd love to launch something like a Coinbase ventures. And he was like, great, write a blog post. And I was like, okay, so I wrote a blog post about what I thought it was. And I handed it over to him and he was like, this looks great, like go for it and I was like, "Well, what do I have to do? Because at LinkedIn, I would have had to talk to like 20 people", and he is like ship it. And we just started making investments. It's -- we've made over 200 venture investments. And I think that the cool thing is like many of the companies that you've heard about in Web3, OpenSea and CoinTracker, and we also do growth investments like FTX and others like we have been in them early in the game. We were in OpenSea in their seat round, and I think that the thing that's so cool about it is that we -- I think we have a disproportionate advantage because we know players in the crypto ecosystem. We can get disproportionate insights about those players and what's popping and what's not. And so for example, for NFTs, like you see kind of this trend of like the NFT players launch and then they kind of just went on this downhill trajectory for many years. But you had a couple of players like OpenSea and others who are like plugging along, building, building, building, not paying attention to the market. And then you see this trajectory. And I think that's what happens when you have investments in really great companies and you can kind of get -- see them early. You can build relationships with the players. Bison Trails is an example. That's a company that we invested in and then acquired. And that is the formation of Coinbase cloud, which is going to be, I think, a huge part of our business going forward. So I think that there's all sorts of benefits to being in the ventures business, and I think we've done it in a really scrappy way. Just for context, we don't even have a team on it. It's just killers at the office who work nights and weekends to do this on the side. They're the crypto-forward folks in the company, and they just like jam on it, and it's super exciting to watch.

That's awesome. Maybe we can speak of the ecosystem, maybe we can hit a few market-related things, I'd love to kind of get your take on some of the industry trends that we've seen over the past year and maybe how they relate to Coinbase. Maybe we can start on a really broad topic of decentralized finance, and I thought we might get the audience involved here a bit. We want to get a sense for just how mainstream DeFi has or hasn't become. So maybe, in the room, could we get maybe a show of hands for anyone who's interacted with the decentralized protocol before? So this would be maybe contributing crypto to compound, trading on Uniswap or maybe earning yields in some kind of protocol. I guess, don't be shy. Okay. So maybe 10 or 15 in a room, standing remotely in here, obviously. You maybe want to talk about how a year from now, we can maybe do this pole again and get more hands up in the room. And maybe Coinbase as a centralized institution, what role does Coinbase play in a decentralized economy?

Yes. Ben Horowitz talks about, like you saw like Michael Douglas holding the old cell phone on the beach. It was like very big, clunky. It was the beginning of what was the mobile revolution, but it took some time. And I think that that's very similar to what we're seeing right now with DeFi. It's just it's clunky. The user experience is painful. If you have to go through a bunch of steps to kind of do what you want to do, and I think it's very intimidating for most people, it's intimidating for me. So I think Coinbase was found in the whole tenet of how we operate like trust, ease of use, regulatory lean in. And I think that that's what's going to happen with the DeFi world. We will have a DAP marketplace where you can access those steps, the decentralized applications in DeFI. But we need to make it way more usable, and we need to make sure that we have the right disclosure. So users feel comfortable about what they're entering and all that kind of stuff. So I think it's a foregone conclusion. It is going to happen. It's just going to take some steps in the same way that other major technologies like the mobile phone did.

Right. Makes sense. And you brought up NFTs earlier. I mean, they've obviously risen to prominence this year. We had a couple of record-breaking sales in the collectibles market. Last step that I saw Coinbase had over 1.5 million users on the NFT waitlist. I think that was mid-October. I think Brian, on the earnings call went so far as to say, he thought the opportunity in NFTs was larger than in traditional cryptocurrencies, which I thought was an interesting comment. Maybe could you help paint the picture for the audience and how you see NFTs evolving and the role that Coinbase will play in?

Yes. All these things that we think about as crypto utilities, whether it's the DAP marketplace that we were just talking about, where you can kind of -- it's the next generation of like an app store or NFTs, that's where Brian believes the next billion users from crypto will come from. And I think that you'll see all sorts of different instances of how this happens and manifest. But the idea is just that with collectibles, non-fungible tokens, you're going to have access to something and that is stamped as something that is exclusive. It is a nonfungible thing. It can't be replicated. It can be traded and all sorts of activity can happen around it, but it is its own unique thing. And I think that we think it's a really interesting key into what we think will be the utility phase of crypto. Crypto started as a speculation phase, right, financial speculation. And that's still a very important component of it. But we want to shift the conversation to things around the utility phase because we think that, that's what are the principles of what we call Web3. Decentralization, privacy, peer-to-peer exchanges, all these different things, I think that NFT is a great example of some of that behavior. And so we're really excited about what we're seeing there. And I think we feel really good about what we're building.

That's great. Maybe 1 more industry history topic. Regulation has been a huge topic with investors recently. Crypto teams have gotten too big for regulators to ignore at this point. Coinbase has been really active in the dialogue. Maybe -- what do you see as the most pressing regulatory agenda items that we kind of need clarity to continue the development of the crypto ecosystem?

Yes. So for context, like, we've leaned into regulatory very early. I think that was an insight that Brian Armstrong and our other Co-Founder, Fred Wilson had, which was very unintuitive given the roots of the crypto community that are a little bit -- there's a little bit of playing with libertarians and so on. But it was this notion that if you're touching people's money that at some point, you're going to have to play nice with regulators. So we definitely don't shy away from anything regulatory. I think that the biggest issue we have right now is that there's just a lack of regulatory clarity. We have to deal -- I think we have more than 50 regulators in the U.S. alone. It's an arduous kind of thing when you're trying to ship great products to customers, and you have to go through these unclear hoops. So when we talk about what we want, we talk about regulatory clarity, we want an even playing field with financial services. We want to understand if there's a way where 1 agency could potentially be the main regulator for crypto, So that all the different things that we do in crypto from trading to potentially derivatives to custody and so on, we don't have to kind of like jump through all these different hoops. The reality is, is that Coinbase can afford to do this. We have a huge staff of lawyers. We have a zillion law firms on retainer. You can imagine, we can afford to do all this, and we can -- and we are doing it. But we actually want the whole crypto ecosystem to thrive because if the whole crypto ecosystem thrives then we all thrive in the crypto. TAM becomes bigger and bigger. And so what we've asked from regulators is can we just have clarity about what the rules of the road are, and then can we potentially have 1 agency? It could even be an existing agency like the SEC or CFTC, but it's just a little bit more there. That's what we're trying for. And we just built out our policy arm this past year. It's kind of late in the game. So we're excited to like actually start amping that up. Our CFO is going to be speaking to the house tomorrow about stablecoins. So I think that's another big step for us.

Great. I'll tune in. Maybe switching gears a little bit to talk about -- a little bit more about the business. Coinbase's volumes at any given point are fairly transparent. I think I looked this morning, it looks like you've already surpassed $400 million of volume and still most of December left to go. I think it's fair to say you're having a decent fourth quarter. If we take a step back at the time of the IPO, Brian wrote in the founder letter about running the company at roughly breakeven on average over time. Obviously, the business has far surpassed that so far. How should investors be thinking about the financial profile of the company over kind of intermediate and long term?

So I always like to just be totally honest about this, like you have to be totally comfortable with volatility. And I think of volatility as a feature, not a bug for Coinbase. But what that means is that you always have to look at the long-term cycles. We've always been able to roughly be profitable over longer-term cycles because of the financial profile. And so what happens is you have really high highs, and sometimes during winters, you have really low lows. We actually love the winters because we can take disproportionate advantage of opportunities. For example, we bought Xapo, which helped us become the largest crypto custodian in the world during the winter. And that was a very -- frankly, it was a kind of a crazy thing to do at the time because it was a winter and it looked really bad. And so we love those periods. If you talk to anybody who's been in crypto for a long time, they look forward to the winters because they think that, that kind of focuses you and allows you to take advantage of opportunities. So the way that I think about it is -- the way that we run the business is the 1 thing we can control is operating expenses. And so we looked forward to when we have a nice stockpile of patch and we say, we're going to make sure that we can always fund the business for a period of years even in a black swan event. At the same time, I think that our opportunity is huge. And when I look at the companies that we admire most like Amazon and others, they doubled down, right? They took advantage of their opportunities. Our biggest issue at Coinbase is that we have no dearth of opportunities. We talked about $1 billion plus revenue opportunities every single day. And the hardest part that we have to do is prioritize those multibillion-dollar opportunities. And so we're going to amp it up. We're going to make sure that we invest in things that we think are going to be game changing, even if it takes many years to kind of come to fruition because we know what's possible. And we planted a lot of seeds, and we're seeing the fruits of this labor. It will take some time for some of them, but we feel really bullish on the future.

Got it. Pricing usually comes up with investors as one of the biggest concerns for the business, just given the concentration of retail commissions in the P&L. The company has been pretty upfront that trading fees will likely come down over time, but probably not in the near term. What do you think of the catalyst for seeing more significant pricing pressure in the industry? And I guess, as a management team, how do you ensure that Coinbase is ready for that?

I mean I know this is like the #1 question and probably top of mind for everybody in the room. We -- it's one of those things where we know at some point there will be compression, but we aren't seeing any signs of it yet. And so we're ready for that day whenever it is. But we -- and the way that we think about it is, we want to control our own destiny. And so the things that we're investing in are subscription and services revenue streams that are much more predictable. The more that the subscription and services revenue streams can pay off our operating expenses such that the trading revenue is gravy on top, that's a great situation to be in. And we're at the beginning of that. But that -- I think we feel very good about the trajectory in the subscription services revenue, if you have a look at that. So I guess the TLDR is that I think many of you have probably seen that the retail and institutional volumes will vary, and so that can contribute to the take rate that we get. But we haven't yet seen the actual compression. We haven't changed our fee structure on the retail side yet. I think that consumers are more than willing to pay a certain fee percentage for the services we offer, particularly the security we offer. We have world-class security in custody when you purchase assets with Coinbase and hold them in Coinbase. So I guess it's a long-winded way of saying like, yes, it will come at some point, but we haven't seen any signs of it yet. And I think we're making the right investments in subscription services to get to that place where it shouldn't be that much of a concern over the longer term.

Got it. And I guess just as 1 follow-up. On the retail side, maybe you can talk a little bit more about the Coinbase's platform. So you've talked about harmonizing the Coinbase and the Coinbase Pro platforms, and we -- I think there's a lot of focus on the difference in the fee structures there. Could you maybe talk about the plans for that, kind of harmonization, and how you expect that to impact the fees that Coinbase receives?

So for context, Coinbase like the Coinbase proper is the consumer retail flagship and then Coinbase Pro for more advanced users and we're kind of harmonizing the platforms. I think that in general, what we try to do whenever we think about this stuff is make sure that the technology scales to serve all users as much as possible. So we've servicified all the technologies such that the trading technology or the custody technology, you can -- it's extensible across the entire horizontal. But then we can create user experiences on top of that, that helps serve very specific customer segments. To date, the data suggests that the Coinbase user and the Coinbase Pro users are very different users. You don't have a Coinbase user who wants to live a candlestick charts. And so I think that yes, is there a possibility that at some point, somebody kind of migrates into that thing where they're starting to be a beginner and then over time, they want to kind of move to a lower fee structure and they want to do more activity? Sure. Like maybe that. But Steve Jobs talked about cannibalize yourself, just offer what the user wants. And over time, that will all work out. And so I'm kind of skeptical that there will be a lot of overlap between the 2. I think instead, it will be both groups growing, but we'll keep testing and see how that all works.

Got it. And maybe you were -- there was some talk about a subscription fee offering as well. Maybe you could add on that as well.

Yes. I mean I think that we see that there's a lot of customers who would love the ability to trade unlimited and would be willing to pay a subscription fee for that. And get access to things, including first-priority customer service and access to other things on the platform, as we've talked about having some notion of like an AmEx Black Card kind of experience where really, really valued customers can have access, for example, to the executive team or something like that. So I think we're playing with the different facets, but we know that there is a demand for a subscription product from Coinbase. And so the easiest way for us to do this is to start playing around with the all you can eat in 1 month and things like that and then see how that plays out over time. But I think it's another way where we would be migrating the shift from things that we can't control to more controllable forms of revenue.

Got it. Makes sense. Maybe switching gears to some of the subscription services. You mentioned being really excited about the growth trajectory there. I guess longer term, when you think about diversifying the revenue streams away from the retail trading aspects of the business. How do you think about the way that Coinbase monetizes being the primary financial account for people to access the crypto economy?

Okay. So we have 3 customer segments. We've got retail. We've got institutional and we've got developer, developer being Coinbase Cloud, which is totally nascent. The way that I think about the business is we start with often a trading use case on the consumer and institutional side. So on the consumer side, somebody -- the first experience is usually, I want to buy a Bitcoin. On the institutional side, usually the first experience is the hedge fund wants to make a large trade in Bitcoin. And then the idea here is we're trying to create an environment where you are joined with Coinbase, you are creating your primary account in the crypto economy, whether you're an institution or a retail user. And you expand your set of services with us over time. I want to say something like 25% plus of our users have engaged with more than 1 product. I think that, that tells you a story of, okay, maybe they came in to buy their first Bitcoin, but then they start getting exposed to other assets and perhaps they start playing around with other features such as staking. And they become more immersed in the crypto economy. And over time, we'll expose them to NFTs, and we'll expose them to all sorts of interesting things. And then on the institutional side, similarly, maybe you trade with us, you custody with us, you lend with us, you accrue a return on all these assets you're holding with us. So it's this -- get them into the system, expand their share of wallet with us and their share of engagement with us, and I think the rest kind of follows from that.

Makes sense. We spent a lot of time talking about the retail side of the business. Coinbase is a powerhouse in the institutional arena as well. And I think this year, institutional assets on platform volume type of clips the retail platform. You also rolled out Coinbase Prime for institutional investors earlier this year. What are the key areas of investment on the institutional side of the business and kind of what are you most excited about?

Yes. I think that it's been really cool to leverage the Coinbase technology and brand and extend it into this new segment. When I joined at the end of -- when I signed at the end of 2017, everybody was talking about institutions getting into crypto. And I think that there was probably too much exuberance about institutions getting into crypto. And here, we actually have the best and bright institutions getting into crypto. So again, what we're going to be investing heavily in is the suite of services. Custody, trading, we want to be able to offer lend, borrow, derivatives and so on. All of the things that you would expect institutions to want, we will offer. We've made a lot of investments in this area. So we did the acquisition of Xapo, as I mentioned, we're the #1 crypto custodian in the world. We did the acquisition of Tagomi, which helped us launch the Prime brokerage in the first place. We acquired Skew, which helps us have analytics for institutions. And so we're building this very robust platform for institutions. And I think that the trust and safety aspect and the fact that we've leaned into regulatory over time, I think those are the things that will help us continue to grow that business over time. I also like it because I think it provides -- like I think that sometimes with institutions, once you get in, they're going to continue to trade and just having them become entrants into this space. It was really cool for us to power some of the bias of companies who wanted to actually buy crypto for their balance sheet. I think that's another big trend that's going to happen. Tech companies, I think, are the first to actually put crypto on their balance sheet. And I think we're going to see more and more companies want to do that.

And Coinbase doesn't take proprietary risk on the institutional side. I think that's been one of the -- that's been one of the hallmarks of your business relative to some of the competitors. Why is that important for your business? How is that a competitive advantage?

I mean I think it's kind of obvious in a way. It's just people don't want to feel like you're trading -- institutions don't want to feel like you're going to be trading against them. And so we've always had a clear line about not doing that.

Got it. Makes sense. Maybe we can talk a little bit about capital allocation and M&A. I mean Coinbase has been very acquisitive in the past. You've talked about acquisitions that you've done in the past already. What's the philosophy around M&A? And where could we see Coinbase do more through M&A in the future?

Yes. We are a product-led company. And so the way -- product-led to me means we're serving customers, what do customers want and how can we serve them in the best way possible. So when we build out a product strategy and a road map, we say these are the most important things on the road map. And are there ways to accelerate that road map through buy or partner? Or should we build it? In some cases, there are going to be amazing assets on the market that we can acquire to help accelerate. And in some cases, there won't be. In which case, we'll just amplify the build. But we've been quite aggressive in M&A. But again, my whole history is M&A, and I changed Coinbase. Everybody talks a big game about doing M&A, every founder, and they don't actually do it. Brian was like, we're going all in. The problem with most CEOs is they're like, "Oh, we can build this. We can build this. It's fine. It's easy." Brian is like, "No, let's bring entrepreneurship inside the confines of Coinbase. Let's bring entrepreneurs in here. They can help us build. They can help us think about things in new ways." And I think it's very refreshing to have that kind of an attitude. So we have tons of M&A opportunity. The team is exhausted. We like -- and it's global. There's just -- we're going to take advantage of that because some of these are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities before the market kind of gets to a place where the market catches up and realizes how amazing these assets could be. So for us, the opportunity set is quite robust.

Looking forward to seeing some of those. Maybe on the competitive side, you mentioned it's a global team on the M&A side. You face a range of competitors, fintechs, other crypto exchanges. Some of the largest competitors are outside of the U.S., names like Binance, FDX come to mind. How do you compete with these platforms in international markets?

Yes. So the way we compete internationally is the way we compete everywhere. So you have fintechs and financial institutions, traditional ones that want to go into crypto. And we love when PayPal is in the market. We love that Square, now Block, is in the market. They help I think, create branding. And I think they create legitimacy for crypto and Web3 in a way that really helps just grow the market and open up the opportunity set. The thing that those players lack is they tend to be Bitcoin only, and they tend to not have crypto DNA. So in the same way that back in the day, you had bricks-and-mortar retailers were like, I'll add digital as a feature. Amazon is what won because Amazon was digital by birth, digital DNA. I think the same goes for crypto DNA. It's just -- it's a completely different set of technologies and you have to be really on your game to understand them. On the other side, we have these super crypto-forward competitors like Binance and FDX that we admire greatly. We love their shipping speed. We admire them. We watch them closely because they're usually first to market with the products that really crypto-forward users want. I think the thing that they probably face the most though is that they have lack of regulatory clarity or lack of regulatory lean-in. And so we just think that that's a difficult place to be, and that's why we choose the harder path of, I think, the regulatory lean-in, which is why we're being so active on the regulatory front. And we think we're the best of both worlds in terms of trying to kind of have the crypto DNA but also being fully regulated.

Got it. So we're starting to hit the end. I want to get through 1 or 2 more questions. We'll see if maybe we have time for 1 audience question. I wanted to kind of shift gears on to the marketing side. Coinbase ramped its marketing budget pretty significantly. I think spent something like $60 million last year. We have you spending closer to $700 million this year, quite the increase. What have you learned in terms of the return on investments for those efforts? How has that benefited the company's growth this year?

Yes. We have been so lucky that the history of all of our growth has been largely organic, hence, the really low marketing spend to date. And we have -- we started kind of with growth acquisition, customer acquisition marketing, which is very easy to measure. We can be really great on payback times and ROI tracking. Product marketing, another function that we just kind of started investing in more. You can imagine, we haven't even been like building the right institutional sales collateral for our sales team. So there's just super low-hanging fruit that we weren't even investing and we were getting business, just kind of packing it together. And then brand marketing is the other piece of this. And I think that you're seeing, obviously, a ton of deals that are happening with some of the other big crypto players that are paying an enormous amount of money for stadium deals and so on. I think that we're going to play our own game. I think that we think that we can definitely amp up the marketing spend because there's just a lot of opportunity to capture. Brian cares a lot about authentic marketing, not the crypto Lambo kind of vibes. Like much more of the we're builders, and like we're really excited about building the next web and next Internet. So more to come, we just hired our first Chief Marketing Officer ever, Kate Rouch, who came from Facebook and was there from the early days and worked with Zuckerberg in the early days. So kind of understands the founder mentality that applies to marketing. It's different than a CPG company, for example.

Got it. Makes total sense. Maybe before we cut it off, what do you think 2022 is going to bring for the industry? And any predictions you'd like to make for the industry or for Coinbase?

I mean I never actually publicly make any predictions on this stuff because I'll -- yes, I'm sure I'll screw up or whatever. But I do think DAOs are like one of the things to watch, decentralized autonomous organizations. I think that, that's something that we're watching very actively because it is the ultimate form of decentralization and participation in the crypto economy. And I think that the things that were wrong in Web 2, a lot of that can be solved with DAOs and other forms of decentralization, we're watching those closely. We think -- we continue to think even if NFTs are kind of bumpy that it's a long-term trend that we think is going to be really big. Hence, why we're investing so much in our own offering. And so we're excited about everything.

Got it. Well, look, I really appreciate you joining us today. Unfortunately, we're just about out of time. But everyone, please join me in thanking Emilie for her time today.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.