Fortune 500 Has Just Added Their First Crypto Company

Coinbase has made history by becoming the first crypto group to find a spot on the Fortune 500 list of America's largest companies. In the 68th edition of the coveted list, Coinbase has been positioned at the 437th spot, with a market cap of around $41 billion as of March 2022. Coinbase first made international trade market waves when it went public last year, becoming the first crypto exchange to get listed on Nasdaq.

The crypto exchange platform's debut on the Fortune 500 list comes at a bittersweet time as the global crypto market has come crashing down and lost about a trillion dollars in a very short span of time. Unsurprisingly, the crash has taken its toll on the company's fortunes as well. In the last quarter of 2021, Coinbase bled over two million monthly active users, while the stock dipped by a margin of over 70%.

In the first quarter of 2022, Coinbase reported a staggering $430 million in losses, which was quite a downfall following four successive profitable quarters with stunning growth figures. However, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was still optimistic about the company's future prospects and mentioned during the recent earnings call that he's "never been more bullish" on where Coinbase currently stood as a company. Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell also classified Coinbase as one of the "real winners" that survived a global pandemic and "can flourish once the world opens back up."

Getting on the Fortune 500 — a list of the most valuable companies in the United States — affords high prestige to any company that gets ranked and effectively guarantees investor interest, too. However, things are not as rosy on the ground. Emilie Choi, Coinbase's Chief Operating Officer, recently announced that owing to the "current market conditions," the company would be slowing down the hiring for 2022, aiming for more efficient corporate prioritization and the meeting of its business goals. 

A majority of Coinbase's revenue comes from the fee it collects from crypto transactions, but the crypto crash of 2022 has put great pressure on that channel. There is certainly a tangible worry that an over-reliance on the aforementioned model for money-making is not going last forever. Coinbase knows that all too well, and has been making moves to diversify the revenue channels. Coinbase revealed that they'd been working on their own NFT marketplace last year and pushed it to the open beta phase in April of 2022, but the NFT market and the fortunes therein are not immune to the factors that have turned the crypto market on its head in recent weeks. 

It is quite evident that Web3 is among the top priorities of Coinbase as it plans for the future, which is not surprising as it counts Andreessen Horowitz — one of the most vocal Web3 proponents out there — among its key investors. It is hard to predict whether Coinbase will ever again surpass the stock market glory days that it enjoyed last year, but the current state of the global cryptocurrency market is not a very good sign.