A few arguments to justify the valuation:

- Government intervention tends to benefit incumbents.

- Coinbase employs a lot of lawyers [1].

- Coinbase invests a lot in lobbying [2].

- While fees are lowering for international exchanges, those who serve US customers are still able to get away with very high fees.

- People are less sensitive to fees when the assets they are buying are very volatile.

- NYSE serves brokers, that then themselves serve the final clients. Coinbase is able to serve customers directly, thus it can keep all the fees for themselves.

[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/coinbase...

[2] https://seekingalpha.com/news/3679495-square-fidelity-coinba...