GM. This is Milk Road – happy Halloween/Bitcoin White Paper Day to those that celebrate!
Here’s what we got for you today:
- ✍️ Coinbase beats Q3 earnings
- ✍️ 3 big pieces of stablecoin news you missed
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Peter Schiff: Why Gold Will Win & Bitcoin Goes to Zero
- 🍪 SBF says FTX was never insolvent
Persona Connect allows users to reuse verified KYC information across multiple platforms. Save time and start verifying with Persona Connect.
Prices as of 2:00 PM ET. Trade today with Milk Road Swap.
COINBASE BEATS Q3 EARNINGS 🔥
Pop quiz – what has:
- Increased its total revenue 55% year-on-year
- Somehow 5x’d its net income in that same time
- A founder who is rumored to derive his power from baldness
Yep, it’s Coinbase.
Though I would have also accepted ‘Silver Surfers’ – the colloidal silver supplement business my uncle Steve was running out of his garage.
(Until the state’s Health & Safety board shut him down due to his customers turning blue… regulators, am I right?)
Anyways, here are our 5 key takeaways & learnings from Coinbase’s Q3 2025 earnings…
1/ Financials
Coinbase beat its earnings expectations after racking up $1.9B in revenue and $801M in adjusted Earnings Before Income Tax, Depreciation, and Amortization – aka: EBIDTA.
(BTW: Amortization is just a fancy word for ‘paying off debt’.)
Transaction revenue grew 37% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) to $1B, while Subscriptions & Services revenue grew 14% QoQ to an all-time high of $747M.
And these numbers get even better when you look at them year-on-year (YoY):
2/ The Everything Exchange
Coinbase added 40k+ assets to its DEX integration in Q3 – to the extent that they now cover ~90% of the total crypto market cap. 🤯
3/ Derivatives
ICYMI: In August, Coinbase officially closed their acquisition of Deribit (one of the world's largest crypto derivatives platform).
And in Q3, they collectively hit all-time highs in derivative trading volume, pulling in over $840B.
(Derivatives = ways to trade an asset without actually owning the asset – e.g. buying the option to scoop up BTC in the future if it hits a certain price.)
4/ Treasury
Coinbase bought $47M worth of ETH and $300M worth of Bitcoin in Q3 alone!
5/ Prediction Markets
And finally, at the end of the call, this happened…
As a result, Coinbase’s stock is up 7.87% on the day as of this writing. 💅
Oh, and if you want to learn what makes Coinbase such a powerhouse – not just quarter-to-quarter, but long term:
ONE KYC TO RULE THEM ALL
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3 BIG PIECES OF STABLECOIN NEWS YOU MISSED 👀
Man, it’s been a helluva week for stablecoin news!
To the extent that we’re going to have to run this as a listed segment to fit it all in (that’s rare in the stablecoin space!).
So here are the 3 big pieces of stable news you missed this week:
1/ Visa adds support
Stablecoin-linked Visa card spend has quadrupled year-on-year (good lord)!
As a result they’re adding support for four new stablecoins, running on four unique blockchains (all of which are yet to be named).
2/ Mastercard to acquire Zerohash (?)
Word on the street is that Mastercard is in late-stage talks to acquire the crypto payments startup, Zerohash, for $1.5-2B.
Think of this like Mastercard buying their own version of Stripe (they get to own the crypto payments infrastructure they use, but without paying Stripe’s $106B price tag).
Here’s just a sliver of what Zerohash offers:
3/ Circle launches its ‘Arc’ public testnet
Arc is Circle’s USDC-based L1.
The idea is that Arc will not be a general purpose blockchain, and will instead be singularly focused on stablecoin payments, lending, and currency exchange.
If they can make it easy for devs to build payments focused apps on their chain → they can grow their user base → and with that, demand for USDC.
Here’s why you should care about all of this…
Remember what we covered in Tuesday’s edition:
To make an onchain transaction, you need to pay fees in the underlying blockchain’s native token.
E.g. If you want to send 20 USDC on Solana, you’ll need to pay the transaction fees in SOL.
So, more use cases for stables = less money being moved out of crypto + more demand for native tokens in order to pay fees.
(And when demand increases for supply-restricted native tokens → number go up).
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
One KYC to rule them all. With Persona, you have to KYC just once and then you can use that verified information across multiple platforms.*
You sure about that? SBF says FTX was never insolvent and that FTT would be worth $22B today (cool, cool, cool. So, er, where’d all those customer funds go?)
Chart Nerds asseeeeemble! The Ethereum Foundation just launched an institution-focused site with a bunch of slick charts and data points.
Liquidation or Restructuring? Our guess is the latter: Strategy just transferred $2.45B BTC to new wallets.
Ondo just announced a landmark partnership with Chainlink. Together, they’ll bring traditional financial institutions onchain and collaborate with major players like SWIFT, DTCC, and Euroclear.*
*this is sponsored content. **this is partner content.
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