Coinbase Global, Inc.

Good afternoon. My name is Mel, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Coinbase fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Anil Gupta, Vice President, Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to the Coinbase fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. Joining me on today's call are Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO, Emily Choi, president and COO, and Alicia Haas, CFO. I hope you've all had the opportunity to read our shareholder letter, which was published on our IR site earlier today. Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that during today's call, we may make forward-looking statements. Actual results may vary materially from today's statements. Information concerning risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in our SEC filings and shareholder letter available on our IR website. Our discussion today will include references to adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, or in isolation from, GAAP measures. You can find additional disclosures regarding adjusted EBITDA, including a reconciliation to net income, the comparable gap measure, in our shareholder letter. We are once again using SAIT technologies to enable all shareholders to post questions to management. In addition, we will take some live questions from our research analysts. Before we get started with opening comments, I wanted to start with a question for Brian. Brian, looking back at 2021, it was an incredible year of growth for crypto and for Coinbase. And looking ahead, some people are suggesting we might be entering a crypto winter. So what's your view of the crypto market today and what's Coinbase's position broadly?

Yeah, thanks, Anil. So I don't think we're entering a crypto winter. In fact, we don't really think about it like that anymore. I think early on in crypto's history, there was this trend of going through, you know, Summers and winters. And the thing is, crypto is kind of working now. And so I don't expect it to be anything quite that pronounced over time. You know, I think we basically have no idea what's going to happen in the next quarter, the next couple of quarters at any moment in our history with crypto. It's like trying to predict what the S&P 500 is going to be next quarter or something like that. And so what we do in the absence of that is we just consistently build great products and grow the business because long-term we're incredibly bullish about the potential of this industry. I mean, I think we're just in the very earliest days of this industry and it has a massive potential TAM. There's a ton of capital being injected into this industry and a lot of the smartest young people are all rushing in to build companies in this space. And then with all those thousands of new companies, I think you're just going to see a ton of innovation. I guess, unlike in past crypto cycles where we might have had summers and winters, crypto is working. We've got major use cases now outside of people just trading it. You know, DeFi has tens of billions of dollars locked up in it. NFTs has been a massive trend and continuing to grow. People are building gaming and social media apps and DAOs and identity systems and I think what we're really seeing is that Web3 is kind of the future of how people are going to build all kinds of applications on the Internet, even non-financial services applications. So the biggest problem we have is not to think about kind of what's going to happen in any given quarter. It's how do we actually capture the size and scale of this opportunity in front of us when there's so many kind of multibillion-dollar business opportunities around us? And so, you know, honestly, we would love a chance to get it, like, catch our breath, right? If things weren't growing quite so quickly, that would almost be better because we have to focus all of our time on scaling when things grow so quickly. Having a chance to invest more in some of these upcoming business opportunities would be the best outcome. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of a sense of how we think about it.