Happy Friday, and welcome back to the Blockspace newsletter!

Coinbase released some killer earnings yesterday, the CBP is playing hard ball (again) with bitcoin mines, and some folks thought it would be a good idea to launch a memecoin for Binance CEO CZ’s dog. For today’s letter, our takes on these news items, plus a few extra headlines.

NiceHash has moved to Switzerland, offering institutional miners a secure, compliant, and transparent platform to manage and maximize their mining output– delivering the reliability and performance expected from the best mining pools. 

Bitcoin is coming to MetaMask

Coinbase reports 2024 earnings

OUR TAKE: Coinbase had a roaring 2024. The United States’ leading exchange released its Q4 and 2024 full year financials yesterday, smashing expectations. Here are the highlights:

• $2.27 billion revenue

• $3.35 billion adjusted EBITDA

• $404 billion assets on platform

• 8.4 monthly monthly transacting users

• $1.16 trillion (!) trading volume

Transaction revenue by source (YoY change):

• Consumer (retail): $3.43 billion (+157%)

• Institutional: $345.6 million (+283%)

Trading volume by source (YoY change):

• Consumer: $221 billion (194%)

• Institutional: $941 billion (139%)

As you can see in the transaction revenue tea leaves, retail made up 88% of Coinbase’s transaction revenue but was only 19% of Coinbase’s trading volume. The ETFs – and bitcoin’s bull run – have obviously been beneficial to Coinbase as more institutional players pile into BTC now that it’s no longer a fringe asset for people who have memorized the collective works of Mises. 

For reference, in the 2021 bull market, Coinbase’s retail trading volume ($535 million) was almost half of its institutional volume ($1.14 billion). Coinbase also had 11.2 million monthly transacting users in 2021, the highest ever for the exchange. So perhaps one takeaway from the earnings call is that retail is sorta-kinda “here,” but not as much as in the past – or if they are, they are piling into the ETFs and not spot like prior runups. 

CBP ramps up ASIC miner crackdown with seizures, new import holds

OUR TAKE: The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency is targeting the wrong kind of hash.

This week, we broke the news that the CBP, acting as a toadie for the FCC, is ramping up its enforcement against ASIC miner imports. Last November, we reported that the CBP was detaining Antminer S21 and T21 models at U.S. ports of entry, specifically San Francisco and Detroit. Well, most of those imports are still stuck, and some are now more stuck, because the CBP has started seizing Antminer models for the first time since the detentions began. One source we spoke with has had $5 million worth of equipment seized. They’ve also broadened their scrutiny and have started detaining MicroBT and Canaan ASIC miners, and the seizures are now happening around ports of entry all over the United States.

What gives? We thought The Donald was the pro bitcoin candidate? Well, maybe American protectionism is coming home to roost, or maybe there’s something bigger here and Big Brother is worried about Sophgo’s ties to Bitmain. 

But that doesn’t explain why the investigation has spilled over to other Asian ASIC manufacturers (unless you don’t discount ignorance, which you probably shouldn’t if the gubment is involved). Speaking of, I’m generally in favor of never attributing to malice what can be attributed to stupidity/ignorance, but this story just doesn’t sit right.

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Binance CEO reveals his dog, inspiring a short-lived memecoin frenzy

OUR TAKE: The only crypto-native person who could rival a Trump memecoin frenzy might be Binance founder, Changpeng Zhao (CZ). But retail memecoin mania looks completely exhausted. What should have been a surefire bet in buying Broccoli, a memecoin coined after CZ’s own dog, has not panned out for gambling hopefuls. CZ himself didn’t actually launch a token, so people are split on what the “true” token is. That said, it was about time for CZ to place his mark on the memecoin frenzy, even if it is a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Overall, with $TRUMP down, $MELANIA underwhelming, and pump.fun extracting over $300 million in platform fees, the shitcoin speculation vibes are down very bad right now. One interesting dimension to this latest memecoin run was the massive bridging event from Solana to Binance Smart Chain. According to DefiLlama, BSC had a net inflow of $53 million vs. Solana’s $16 million bridged into the chain this week (almost all of the liquidity seems to be leaving Ethereum, (-$134 million) and Base (-$28 million). 

The chart below posted by Zack Voell sums up the diminishing hype well.

Bitcoin news

UTXOracle is live

User Simple Steve announced the (re)initiation of an oracle that can reliably deliver the price of Bitcoin based upon a heuristic of Bitcoin’s UTXO set. The oracle maps out bitcoin transactions that are likely rounded USD values to back out the USD price of bitcoin at a given time (there’s also a bunch of other tech wizardry involved, but we won’t butcher that here). 

Bitmain sells half it’s Core Scientific stock

ASIC manufacturing giant Bitmain took profits on about half of its 10.7 million shares in $CORZ. This reduces Bitmain’s ownership of $CORZ from 5.5% to 1.9%.

BitGo weighing going public this year

According to Bloomberg, the crypto custody firm is considering an IPO in 2025 (alongside numerous other crypto companies). BitGo was last valued at $1.75 billion in 2023 and includes backers such as Goldman Sachs and Valor Equity Partners. 

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