Coinbase Just Made More Money in 3 Months Than It Did in All of 2020

Coinbase, which plans to go public next week, just shattered its prior revenue and profit numbers from 2020 -- all in a matter of three months.

The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. announced that it expects to generate a profit between $730 million and $800 million on revenue of $1.8 billion in the first quarter of 2021.

That would be up from the $322 million profit the company reported for all of 2020 on total revenue of $1.28 billion, numbers that were already up significantly from 2019. Total verified users on the platform have also jumped to 56 million, up from 43 million in 2020.

The rapid success in the first quarter can be attributed to the meteoric rise in the price of Bitcoin (BTC +0.01%) over the last six months or so.

Toward the end of 2020, the price of  Bitcoin rose from around $11,000 in September to about $29,000 at the end of the year. Then it continued its surge and currently trades for more than $56,000.

Coinbase also provided some further guidance for the year. One key metric the company watches is monthly transacting users (MTUs), which are retail users who make a transaction on the platform one or more times during a rolling 28-day period.

In the first quarter of this year, the company had 6.1 million MTUs. It expects over this year to average anywhere from 4 million MTUs to 7 million, all of which depends on crypto market capitalization and crypto asset price volatility.

As previously announced, Coinbase plans to go public under the ticker COIN on the Nasdaq through a direct listing. Unlike a traditional initial public offering, in which the company would hire underwriters and issue new shares, Coinbase will allow existing equity owners to sell their shares to the public.

The company will seek to raise as much as $1 billion. It was recently valued as high as $100 billion in private market trading.