Transaction expense eats 24% of their revenue ($278M). Sales and marketing eats 17% ($200M). Technology and development eats $571M. General and Administrative eats $414M. Other expenses eats $259M. In total, $1.721B in operating expenses. They have nearly 5,000 employees.

As axg11 noted, they're building lots of new things. As I noted in another comment, they probably need to step up their marketing given how Crypto.com and FTX are saturating sports with their names.

If you're trying to grow a new platform with ever-changing things customers want while managing over $20B and have 9.2M monthly transacting users, it's going to cost a bunch. Could they be more efficient? Maybe. However, being more efficient might mean missing out on the Next Big Thing. One could argue an "efficient" company wouldn't have created Coinbase in the first place - a company catering to some upstart electronic token nonsense when they could be putting their energy into something people want. And in 2014/2015 it looks like Bitcoin didn't do anything amazing (Coinbase was founded in 2012, but my BTC-USD chart only goes back to 2014). It was late-2017 when we saw the spike to $19,000 and 2020 was really the first year it stayed over $10k most of the time.

So they need to spend a decent amount on R&D to basically make sure what they're doing is still the next big thing. If you just wanted to create a company making money, you could start a bank. Coinbase is trying to be a future of finance and investing - and no matter how much you believe in crypto, you don't know exactly what that future is. Coinbase needs to make sure they have a finger in every little pie and that costs money.

They are trying to do everything:

- Professional trading platform (Coinbase Pro)

- On-ramp for the masses (Coinbase)

- NFT marketplace (Coinbase NFT)

- web3 infrastructure (Coinbase Cloud)

- Debit card w/ crypto rewards (Coinbase Card)

- Crypto for businesses (Coinbase Institutional / Coinbase Custody)

Each of these is a huge undertaking, often across multiple different markets across the globe.

Coinbase is an atypical "tech" company to analyze because they're kind of like a bank: much of their asset sheet is driven by customer deposits. Apparently $738m of customer funds were withdrawn from Coinbase in the last 3 months. This is in comparison to an inflow of $2.35bn (!) in 21Q1.

As for expenses, there is a usual culprit in the $352m of stock-based comp. There's a large impairment expense of $229m, which is caused by their crypto asset holdings. Together, those make up $600m, and don't involve the transfer of money.

> Under GAAP, we are required to record impairment charges on our crypto assets held when the price falls below its cost basis.

FWIW they went from $17.6bn cash on hand to $16.1bn cash on hand.

Given their headcount of 4k with the usual engineering salaries and some infrastructure it's not that surprising I would say.

edit: misread your question - removed the stupid joke.

That just means they're spending about the same they spent in Q4.