I guess they need the other 4684 employees for legal and compliance.

Of course not. HN Headcount Guy™ sincerely believes anything that isn’t engineering (and perhaps occasionally a single support person who also delivers the catered lunches and does the marketing “work”) doesn’t exist.

Obviously crypto companies can get by without any real regulatory considerations for a while…

businessofapps.com claims they only do 8M transactions per month, and have/had 4500 employees, so 8M transactions / 4.5K employees / 20 working days/month that's 88 transactions to post per day.

They don't need datacenters, quill pens and paper accounting could handle that 200 years ago with about 3 hours work per day.

Generally supermarket cashiers can do somewhat less than 30 transactions per hour, so I think its justified they should be able to do all the accounting manually in three hours.

The numbers do look a bit odd.

I could open a "full service" gas station with dudes to fill the tank and wipe the windshield and upsell services. It varies by state, but nobody put full service gas stations out of business where I live. The market wiped them out; just can't run full service, doesn't mean the workers didn't sweat enough or the market wasn't competitive enough. People won't pay what it costs to run, so they don't run that anymore. Wash your own windshield and pump your own gas.

The other problem is its a form of sophistry to react to "the absolute numbers are awful" with a prayer to the efficient market hypothesis like "why hasn't a more successful competitor arisen". That deflects from the original question in a sophistry manner, not answers it. Sure, I'm a believer too, but can't answer a technical question with a prayer. The original question stands unanswered, why are the absolute numbers so utterly awful?

Note I'm a happy customer, it would be nice for them not to go out of business, but with those numbers...