Wall Street still doesn’t get crypto

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines!

Friday afternoon the Equity team took to a Twitter Space to hit on a topic that we had to cut from our regular end-of-week show, namely crypto earnings and how Wall Street is digesting the results. And to bring in extra mental horsepower, Natasha and Alex lassoed new TechCruncher Anita Ramaswamy to help.

We touched on Coinbase’s Q3 financial results and what they tell us about trading incomes, and the company itself. Robinhood’s own Q3 results were part of the chat as well, as they showed a similar pattern to what Coinbase disclosed.

More companies than just those two, newly-public entities are reporting crypto trading declines. Square did as well, after its bitcoin revenues slipped in Q3. Simply put, consumers traded less crypto in Q3 than they did in Q2, and a number of companies that were recently riding high on that particular volatility cycle had to deal with a down-cycle period.

We talked about what the results mean for the noisy world of crypto startups, many of which are looking to the highly-visible Coinbase as an indicator of what they can expect as they attempt to scale in a volatile market.

Equity is back Monday!