Oh, thank you. All right. Hi, everybody. Welcome to our next session. I'm Ben Budish. I'm Barclays analyst covering the brokers, asset managers, and exchanges segment. With us, for this fireside chat, we've got Alesia Haas, CFO of Coinbase. Alesia, thanks so much for being with us.
Thanks for having me.
I'd like to start off with, you know, some of the surprises that we kinda got on the last earnings call, one of which was kind of the ongoing OpEx management. So in the quarter itself, you guys beat pretty handily in terms of your margins. But lately, and thinking high level here, you know, you and Brian have been sort of talking more and more about, you know, a bit of a philosophical switch from profitable across cycles to profitable in all market conditions. Can you maybe talk about that a little bit? I think investors are always trying to get a better understanding of, like, what is the long-term profitability profile of the company like, but maybe talk about that shift a little bit. How should we think about it?
Thanks. Yes, there was a distinct shift. When we went public, we said in RS-1 when revenues, when macro environment is good, when crypto is strong, we will make money, and that we were okay burning when crypto went through winters, 'cause we've seen crypto be very volatile over the last 11 years in our existence. We've gone through four price cycles. What is important about crypto is what we've seen historically is the peaks are always higher than last peak, and the trough is always higher than last trough. We never wanted to pull and contract back our spend such that we weren't ready for the next bull run. What happened over the last year is obviously we saw two things happen. 1 is the broader macro environment changed.
As you know, I'm probably speaking to the choir here, is the investment community really shifted from a growth model to a value model. We saw value accruing to those who were focused on profits, who were focused on bottom line. Another important thing happened in 2022 in crypto, which was we saw two large events, the Terra Luna depegging in May of 2022, which then precipitated a few bankruptcies. That really spooked the market, and it spooked customers, importantly, to say, "Will my assets always be safe? Can I recoup my assets in the event this company fails?" We got a lot of questions 'cause we had to add bankruptcy disclosure to our financials as a result of SEC guidance. Because crypto is so nascent, there hadn't been any crypto bankruptcies at the time.
We weren't able to say, we can rely on decades or even centuries of bankruptcy law, and this is how your assets will be treated. We had to say there was some risk. That event, and then obviously, unfortunately, with the fraud that we saw at FTX, we felt it became really important to demonstrate to our customers that we were financially strong. It was the macro environment, and then it was also wanting to assure our customers that we were gonna be here through any condition and that we were a safe set of hands, a strong fiduciary. Having profits, having positive cash flow, having strong EBITDA are good things that we can control. While there's a lot of crypto that we can't control, driving I think my mic went off. Okay, there we go.
Our goal is to build revenues, build our business such that we can be profitable in now all market conditions. I will note that this is a journey. This is not we're gonna turn a dime in one quarter, even though we made a good step forward in Q1. This year's specific goal was just to improve notional EBITDA year-over-year, that we're gonna make an improvement in 2023 compared to 2022. We haven't changed that outlook at this point in time, but we are making a lot of decisions to be very disciplined in how we spend our money, and you saw that come in our Q1 results.
Got it. Just thinking, you know, you mentioned the expectations for this year. How should we just think sort of tactically the next couple of quarters? You know, how much flexibility is there in the cost structure should the crypto winter continue? I think a lot of investors are expecting you're preparing for a lengthy battle with the SEC. How do we just think about your kinda near-term flexibility there?
Look, over half of our costs are headcount costs, and we have said in our outlook that we anticipate our headcount being roughly flat year-over-year or roughly flat to the Q1 levels. That is a variable that's in our control. We can always choose to change that. At this point in time, we feel like that is the right investment. We're not short-changing the future by just investing in the current product suite. We're continuing to think about the frontier of crypto. If you look in the Q1 shareholder letter, we have a lot of products. We have a lot of different initiatives, and many of these are in what we call our strategic or venture phase. They haven't necessarily old gained finance product- market fit. They are still very nascent in their development.
We always can make the decision to adjust the portfolio that we are investing in. As a result... Do I? I'm failing at this. I'm so sorry. Yeah. Okay. Shall I take this one off? You'll just turn that one off. Okay. I can't move as much. I need to, like, be focused on my mic. We have variable costs that will ebb and flow with transaction volumes, but then we also will make decisions to readjust the portfolio if conditions necessitate that we do.
Understood. Definitely wanna get into some of those other kinda longer term revenue drivers in a bit. Maybe kinda circling back to the quarter, you know, the other big surprise was sort of the revenue beat that came from some of the pricing actions you took. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that, sort of the decision to implement the pace of the rollout? You know, what sort of impact are you seeing on your retail user behavior, and how sustainable do you think that could be going forward?
Thanks for the question. We did increase retail spread on our Simple product in Q1. I think again, I need to go back to what happened in 2022 again. 2022 was a year of disruption where we saw companies fail, and it really made us focus again on our brand. Our brand promise is to be most trusted and easiest to use. Those are the two key tenets that we've leaned on since our founding in 2011. The focus here is when you think about most trusted, we haven't ever lost a customer dollar, we are safely custodying these assets for folks, and we can't say that about all of the companies last year. We decided to more actively evaluate our pricing. We're assessing different pricing models.
We now offer multiple different pricing models for our consumers, where they have the option to trade on our Simple platform, where there is a fee plus a spread. They can trade on the Advanced platform where there's this fee only, there's no spread on Advanced when you're turned back in directly with the order book. There's Coinbase One, where you can then pay a subscription fee and trade unlimited for a certain amount. There is a spread there as well. We're evaluating. I would say pricing can be dynamic. We are testing different pricing regimes and understanding the impact on our customers. We're really pleased with the results in Q1.
I've said this before, and I do believe this, that over a long term, and it's undefined what long term means in crypto, but what we've seen in all other financial assets is that they become commoditized at some point in time, and that drives pricing down. Crypto is not yet commoditized, and so I don't believe this is the forever pricing model, but this is one that we are operating today and feel that we can dynamically move to address our customer needs and our operational needs.
Got it. You know, thinking more about sort of the Simple trading experience, it seemed like, you know, back in December, we kind of first saw this, and it seemed like an anomaly, but it's kind of stayed consistent as crypto volatility has kind of stayed subdued. It's like the Simple trader that stayed remarkably resilient, more so than the Advanced trader, so it seems. What do you attribute that behavior to? What sort of, you know, engagement levels are you seeing, you know, from the different customer types?
I think we're only two quarters post FTX, which is hard to imagine because it feels like a lifetime ago, but it's really only been since November. What we saw in Q4 is we did see volatility bottom out, and we did see then the advanced traders, the pro traders kind of take a step back from the market. It wasn't that we saw an increase in simple trade, it's just we lost then the pro trading volume in that quarter. That's not surprising because these are the traders that are trading on all of the platforms. Most likely, we don't know this definitively, but most likely they had some exposure to FTX and other platforms. It's not surprising when you see that big of a market shock that people kind of say, "Whoa, do I need to re-underwrite my counterparties"?
Do I understand the risk I'm taking?" Coinbase did that. We re-underwrote all of our counterparties following FTX to make sure we really understood the risk, and we were really happy that we did not lose material dollars through any of these events. That's what happened in Q4. In Q1, we actually saw the volume kind of rebound back to historic levels, the mix in Q1 was very similar to what the mix was in Q3 of 2022 and proceeding. It comes back to the brand value, it comes back to most trusted, it comes back to, you know, we've added more product features over time. We've added recurring buys, we've added simpler ways to engage, we think that this is really attracting our user base.
How do you think about sort of competition on the retail side? You know, there's a lot of other platforms that claim to be free, whatever that may actually mean. You know, it seems like the pricing adjustment isn't really stirring, you know, steering customers one way or another. How do you think about competition, and are you seeing any sort of switching behavior from customers? Do you see where they're coming from? Can you see where they're going to?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I want to start with the first thing, which is nothing is free. It's just monetized in different ways. Whether or not the user sees the fees or whether or not you're getting payment for order flow behind the scenes, whether or not it's embedded in some other mechanism of getting paid, nothing is technically free. We have chosen the pricing model where we have a fee plus a spread. When a customer trades, they see the total cost of their trade in the screen before they click buy, That is the path that we have gone down. Because Coinbase is one of the unique platforms that offers the ability to send and receive off platform, not many of the other consumer platforms today that are in the FinTech space offer that ability.
What then tends to happen is on another platform, you sell back to fiat, you move your fiat to your bank, then your bank connects to Coinbase, and then you on. In most situations, we can't. We can see when it's going to more crypto data firms where it sends and receive between the platforms. We can see does money flow from Coinbase to Binance, as an example. Did money flow from Coinbase to FTX? We're not seeing a lot of that. We do see more fiat movements, and then it's very hard to see exactly which Fintech platform it may or may not have come from. What we tend to see, though, is what we believe is more happening, and this is not provable, is customers come to Coinbase for crypto, and this is like their crypto portfolio.
That the other platforms, because they've added cryptos and adjacency to other products, are just growing the market, and this is helping grow exposure to crypto. With other platforms, when you can get the value of, I can buy Bitcoin, great. Maybe I now buy Ethereum. Sometimes what you see in the journey is you want to do the next step. You want to stake your Ethereum, and you can't do that yet on all of the competitors. Our differentiation right now is that we're offering a breadth of products and services. We're offering more ways to engage with your crypto than a lot of our competitors at this time in the U.S. Fintech space. Crypto natives also offer this.
Against crypto natives, we offer trust, we offer compliance, we offer controls and safety, disclosures, and against Fintechs, we're offering breadth of product and utility and experiences in crypto.
Got it. Makes a lot of sense. What about on the institutional side?
Mm-hmm.
It seems like over the course of last year, you were signaling that you were sort of lowering price in order to be more competitive. More recently, maybe you sort of switched that trade-off to optimize a little bit for revenues, and that seemed to really pay off in the first quarter. I understand that some of that was just due to FTX, which was garnering a lot of institutional share in the U.S. With FTX gone, there are some sort of new startup exchanges in the U.S., some of which are, you know, backed by more of the traditional exchange players, you know, providing very liquid markets, tight spreads. You know, again, the revenue versus volume trade-off seemed to really pay off. How do you see this playing out over the next couple of years?
And really, like, how big is the institutional trading piece to Coinbase?
It's a great question. First I want to break institutional into two different customer cohorts. One are the market makers. The other broad cohort is everybody who's not a market makers, which is these are the hedge funds, these are the pensions, these are the endowments, these are high-net-worth family offices, these are corporates. This is everybody that's not a market maker in the other side. Those customers are trading on what we call our Prime broker platform. They're using our smart order router. They're allowing us to find the best price across any liquidity venue in the space that we can connect to. The market makers are trading on the exchange. They are the highest volume, lowest fee customers that we have. They're making the markets, they're finding the arbitrage opportunities throughout the crypto ecosystem.
They are very price sensitive because sometimes it's just not even worth doing the trade if they can't make a profit on it. Those fees really matter because sometimes the spreads between exchanges are so tight that they can't actually make the market. This is what we were offering the price discounts on. This is where with FTX leaving the market, we have the ability to, with the order books that we have, with the liquidity we have, reduce those discounts that we were offering. What's more exciting to us in institutional is we're actually seeing growth, and we saw all-time high trading on the prime broker platform, which has been in everybody but market makers. We're seeing growth of true institutional capital and trading.
We're also seeing now two quarters in a row of really heightened onboardings of institutions to our prime brokerage platform. I know we've said this, but we do believe that institutions are continuing to adopt crypto and get deeper into the market. I think it's just important to distinguish where the pricing discounts really matter and where we're trading volume for revenue versus what we're seeing as, like, steady, more durable long-term growth opportunities.
Great. very interesting. maybe just move to another one of your key revenue drivers, which more recently has been, you know, within the interest income bucket, USDC. I think the revenue model has sort of become pretty well understood by investors at this point, but maybe just thinking about recent events, you know, kind of following the disclosure that Circle had a, you know, a certain amount of funds at Silicon Valley Bank, even though everything shook out fine, we've really seen USDC market cap, you know, decline since then. what's the view from Coinbase there? It would almost seem that, I think from Circle's perspective, a lot more of their deposits are now held at Bank of New York.
You could argue that if you compare it to, you know, other global stablecoins, it's even more safe relatively than it was before. You know, what do you think the primary drivers are of the, you know, the kind of recent price action?
Perverse, the transparency really hurt us, isn't it? Just for those who don't know, Circle had $3.3 billion of USDC reserves at Silicon Valley Bank. As a result of the uncertainty over the weekend, because crypto is 24/7, we do not benefit from the market shutting down over that weekend, the markets were still moving very rapidly. USDC depegged from a 1 to 1 down to the trough of $0.88. Unfortunately, there was a lack of information in the market because if you would say $3.3 billion out of $42 billion, you wouldn't understand the 12% discount.
You wouldn't have said, "We're gonna have 100% severity on $3.3 billion coming off that balance sheet. You would have said, "There's probably some recovery value of the assets if the FDIC wasn't gonna step up." Unfortunately, the market was not sophisticated enough to price that in, one. Two, unfortunately, because money froze, right? Circle couldn't move their money to front end settlement banks over that weekend, so they couldn't keep minting and burning up. The market makers couldn't gain access to new supply to close this price arbitrage. As a result of just the lack of matching between banking hours and crypto hours, you had this unpegging event happen, and we have to recover from that. What are we doing? That's the most important thing. Ultimately, no loss of funds, everything worked out.
Once the markets reopened, the peg reestablished within hours on Monday morning. Now we're having to rebuild and really focus on education, really go to the next level of transparency around USDC, which is in part Circle, who's the issuer, has moved a lot of the reserves to GSIB, recognizing that there could still be bank risk in the system. Then on the Coinbase side, 'cause we're a reserve USDC, so we don't control the reserves directly, but we are working on educating our customers. We're working on providing more access to USDC. We're working on providing rewards on USDC, which we think is an important vehicle in this interest rate environment. When we launched our international exchange last week, we are now settling 100% of trades in USDC to really focus that on liquidity and driving back that market cap.
Great. You kind of answered my next question here, which-
Sorry. Go ahead.
That's all right. Which was what can Coinbase do? You know, what are your initiatives regarding USDC? Maybe digging into that a little bit deeper. I mean, what are the current use cases for, you know, institutional customers, retail customers? Is it, you know, treasury management? Is it, you know, trading on DEXs or using DeFi? And how do you think that evolves over time? Like, what sort of gets it, you know, growing again?
I love this question. The goal of USDC is to be a better dollar. When you think about the attributes of a dollar, I think about them as speed of settlement. I think about them as cost of a transaction. What is the payment rail? I think of as access, I think of it as availability. I think about it then, like, risk and fraud and protection. All the buckets, like, is it really a dollar? Today, what USDC is better than a dollar at all the time is availability, 'cause it's 24/7. It is instant settlement, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
You can do things during time periods when the banks are not open, which is great for market makers 'cause it matches the settlement time of the crypto markets. When they're trying to bring, you know, a Bitcoin Ethereum spread over the weekend, they can settle that in USDC. They can move their funds across platforms 24/7. That is what is the primary use case. It's market makers creating arbitrage opportunities across the crypto markets, creating efficiency in the markets. The second area that is predominantly used within decentralized finance applications, so it's collateral within lending applications in Compound. It is in MakerDAO, and it's used as a stable asset within DeFi that can be transacting on the blockchain. That's today value proposition.
The real opportunity, quite candidly, I believe, is to then work on the cost aspect and the speed aspect. That's where Coinbase is taking some specific initiatives with our launch of Base, which is a layer two protocol that we announced earlier this year. Our ambition with Base is to get payments to be 1 second, 1 penny. If we can achieve that then opens up a new breadth of opportunities for USDC or other stablecoins that are built on top of Base, 'cause Base is a protocol layer. That then becomes, instead of the fragmented payment systems that we have today, stitching together various different countries, it becomes one global ecosystem, one layer that you can send value across chain for a very low cost and very fast time.
I think that opens up new doors for use cases.
Great. Well, you mentioned one of the use cases is gonna be settlement on the offshore derivatives platform. Why don't we chat about that a bit? You know, maybe to level set first, though, can you talk high level about Coinbase's international business? I mean, I think you disclose in your K's and Q's the percentage of revenues coming from overseas, but what are your primary exposures, you know, in terms of geographies? What's the customer behavior like? How does it, you know, compare or contrast to those in the U.S.? Is it more retail, more institutional? What can you share just high level there?
Well, it probably will not surprise you that customers outside the U.S. have different needs than customers in the U.S. That we are just starting to kind of think about how to best approach all the international markets. Today, our international revenues that you see disclosed in our Q, they were 11% as a Q1 historically, they've been in the, you know, up to 20% of revenue, is predominantly retail trading, so it's just buy sell crypto. Having access to fiat rails is critical to our retail revenue streams. Historically, the predominant currencies that we offered were U.S. dollars, pounds, and euros. That was what generated the majority of our revenue, buying Bitcoin with pounds, buying Ethereum with euros, et cetera. We have a couple initiatives.
One is we are trying to unlock the G- US portfolio of products to international customers on the retail side. That means we just launched USDC in the last few months. We are looking to unlock staking opportunities and just to continue to roll out our US offerings. On the institutional side, the international exchange then was the first kind of institutional product, and it was also our first derivatives product, which we're really excited about because derivatives, no surprise to many of you in this room, are multiples of trading volume as than spot markets. Having access to these products, we think is an important unlock for Coinbase. This is now two weeks old, so too early to talk about, but we hope to talk about it in coming quarters.
On the institutional side, we also are starting to think about building a product suite for non-U.S. customers. The market makers are global, and they trade across our exchange on the U.S. platform through different subs. We think that we can build custom products that will attract very specific different customer behaviors that we see across the world.
Got it. Well, you said it's too early to talk about, but being a nosy analyst-
Okay, fine.
I'm gonna ask about it anyway.
Please.
Maybe just.
Two weeks of data, people. Not a lot of info.
How about, like, the longer term pipeline? You launched, I think, with a limited subset of tokens, leverage levels, and as you said, the institutional business outside the U.S. is a, you know, it's more retail heavy. I guess I'm sure some of this depends on what you see over the next many weeks and months, but how are you thinking about the long-term opportunity? As you said, you know, most offshore exchanges seeing multiples more in terms of derivatives revenues versus spot. What gets us from here to there? What are the sort of factors we should think through or be looking for?
We think there's a really unique opportunity for what we consider the most trusted brand to start offering our products and services to international customers, especially in the derivatives market, perpetual futures. This is an area where FTX had a lot of revenue. This is an area that Binance has a lot of revenue. This is an area where there's proven markets, and now there's a question of like, how will Coinbase compete and can we offer a competitive product? You are right that we offer a lower leverage product.
At the moment.
At the moment, but that is by design, and that was an intentional choice because, again, we want to be the most trusted. We do not... We think that there's an opportunity here that this meets the majority of customers' needs. So we will test to see if we need to expand that. We will learn from this. More likely you'll see more trading pairs, you'll see more growth in that area. We are gonna watch and learn. We think these are big, known markets, and think there's an opportunity for our brand to really start to build a presence there.
Great. Maybe sort of sticking on the international theme. Outside the U.S., there's been a lot of, you know, positive regulatory developments, you know, the passing of MiCA in Europe, developments in LATAM, Southeast Asia. You know, for Coinbase, what do these regulatory changes sort of allow you to do that you couldn't do before? How does the, you know, the path forward open up a little bit?
It doesn't actually offer new permissions. For the most part, what it does is confirm things that we are doing. It helps create the regulatory clarity, provides, you know, acknowledgement about the unique benefits of crypto and how those need to be treated in these regulations. At this point in time, there's gonna be things we have to do, of course, but we don't believe that it's gonna unlock a meaningful new product suite. It's just gonna be a clarity about our business going forward and what the reporting regimes and regulatory requirements are.
Got it. Then I think in the U.S., you guys have been pretty clear about your positions there, so we'll leave that one for now. Maybe moving to some of the other products. You know, at least we can think about the longer term revenue drivers. Maybe starting with staking, which is probably one of the larger revenue buckets outside of trading and interest income. I guess at high level, you know, how important is staking in particular to the, your longer term growth expectations? What are the key growth drivers? Is it, you know, demand from retail investors seeking yield and also wanna own Ethereum? Is it sort of the increasing importance and ongoing development of proof-of-stake protocols?
You know, what are the drivers there, and how big can it be?
All of the above. Our long-term view is that more and more assets in the world become tokenized. We believe that things will move on-chain. We believe that at this time, proof-of-stake protocols offer a more competitive advantage against proof-of-work protocols because they're more energy efficient. Also they allow anybody to participate in the growth of a network. Anybody can. It's somewhat like if anybody who wanted to get part of Visa's payment volume, got paid by being part of that network, by confirming transactions. Proof of stake is that you stake your assets that you might own, and then you validate transactions through the protocol. As that volume grows and there's more activity, there's more staking rewards that get paid out, and you can participate in the overall growth of the activity on that network.
We think it's important to the development of crypto broadly, that more and more volume will come, but then you need to validate more transactions, and more and more people can participate in this, and it becomes a decentralized way to participate in the growth of the crypto economy. I think that we will see more transactions on-chain. I think that we will see more chains adopt proof-of-stake. It's also possible that we'll see more consensus mechanisms. I think that, you know, 10 years ago, did we know proof-of-stake was gonna come? I didn't. Maybe somebody smarter than me did.
Certainly not myself.
Maybe. Technology is rapidly evolving. At this point, I think it's a critical one. I would broaden staking to say something slightly different, which is staking custody, USDC for that part, all revenue streams that we earn out based on the assets on our platform. What we've been able to uniquely show is that we can safely store assets on our platform for 11 years, that we haven't had any material loss of customer funds. That is our value proposition, uniquely storing. Then we're gonna find ways to monetize assets that we store on our platform and find new ways of revenue stream. Just that growth of assets on platform is one of the critical business drivers of Coinbase, I would say.
Got it. Then thinking high level about crypto, you talk about sort of the growth of the overall ecosystem, new protocols, who knows what.
That's right.
You know, where is Coinbase or what are you sort of doing to encourage that participation? You've got Coinbase Cloud, you've got, you know, Base.
That's right.
maybe talk about that a little bit.
Look, at the end of the day, one of our key value attributes is we're a crypto native. We understand these new protocols. We know how to validate transactions on these blockchains. We know how to monitor transactions on these blockchains. We know how to safely store these types of assets. That is what's unique to us. We think there's an opportunity to then take our unique value proposition and then sell those to other companies who might want to offer crypto native services to their end users, but don't wanna then figure out how to safely store, how to validate transactions, how to monitor transactions. That's what's part of Coinbase Cloud. It's basically offering up these capabilities to anyone else who wants to build on them, so developer tools.
That is what we consider the real, I don't wanna put timelines on this, but the longer term value proposition around software businesses that we can build out of the unique products that we've already built.
Got it. Maybe we'll see if any questions in the audience, otherwise we can continue. All right, let's move on. Another one of the products you talked about, Coinbase Prime, it sounds like there's sort of a lot of institutional onboarding. Maybe talk about that business a little bit and sort of the custody business. I think the understanding is that, you know, in general in crypto, prime brokerage is, you know, it's on the way, but still kind of fall behind sort of traditional prime brokerage services that a bank like Barclays would offer to a hedge fund. Where do you see that business in terms of, like, where it needs to be? You know, how important is lending? How deeply built out is that?
How important is, you know, the custody solution and how that's all integrated?
It's coming. It's coming. It's pretty much there. Okay, Prime is an integrated custody platform. It is a prime broker where we have a smart order router that's routing trades across about 10 liquidity venues, which means that we are able to find best price for our customers. We're able to execute very large trades. We've done north of billion-dollar trades for customers without moving the market from being able to execute very efficiently across that platform. We are rolling out financing products. We have them in a nascent state. We offer trade finance, we offer certain financing lines, all fully underwritten. We've taken no credit losses. We're very proud of our track record here in crypto. Now we've launched derivatives off the offshore exchange, and so we're building out kind of the product suite.
We were really happy we announced the acquisition of an asset manager in Q1. We're filling in what I would consider the verticals of a more traditional prime brokerage platform and onboarding customers at this time. Early days, but we look to be able to offer the full suite and very comparable experiences to what our hedge funds would have expected of any other broker-dealer.
Got it. Maybe my last question here, just on the same topic. I think investors sort of expect that with some regulatory uncertainty, institutions are more likely to hold back, but it sounds like the onboarding is going quite well. What is perhaps the missing link? Is it, you know, or are these institutions, you know, they're sort of long in the process of onboarding and now it's starting to come to fruition? Is there perhaps less worry from that group or is it a specific type? Is it hedge funds, family offices, a specific-?
Yeah.
cohort that's less worried or how should we think about that?
Everything is different. Some institutional investors are definitely focused on the regulatory headwinds. Some take comfort that they were trading just Bitcoin, and Bitcoin has been clearly stated to be a commodity by many different speeches that we've seen over the years. There's varying degrees of views between for the regulations. Others are just looking at price. Others kind of were watching and ready to engage pre-FTX, and then said, "Whoa, I need to step back," and are wanting to make sure that the market is stabilized and that there's not another shoe to drop, there's not other leverage in the system that hasn't been exposed yet. I think a lot of people are positioning themselves, a lot of people are getting ready. A lot of people have very strong theses about why they want to allocate a portion of their investment portfolio to crypto.
Others are kind of positioned to say, like, "When is that utility phase coming? Like, can I see it and can I jump in right before that?" The short answer is lots of engagement, lots of excitement, and you continue to see that kind of grow quarter by quarter.
Great. Unfortunately, we're out of time, but Alesia, thanks so much. What a great conversation.
Thank you so much for having me.
Really appreciate you being here.