I would say Coinbase is making money hand-over-fist with retail. The basis points they charge are enormous compared to stock exchanges. Crypto is low-volume compared to traditional equity markets but very high-fee.
My understanding is that retail is moving to DEXes. Uniswap just passed Coinbase in total trading volume. Retail investors are quite reasonably getting tired of getting screwed and opting out entirely.
True retail is mostly on CEX's. Folks on DEX's are mainly power users.
Also there are two reasons why DEX's have high volume:
- Long tail of assets are only on DEX's. Average retail isn't buying these
- DEFI protocols utilize DEXs. I would argue most of the volume isn't people trading, rather automatic trading to support protocols like Yearn.finance
Of course they are. Let's assume they are making 0.20% per trade (you can lookup their fee tiers online) - at current volumes that's around $5mio a day in fees. I doubt coinbase even needs the money - the IPO market is just really hot for blockchain related companies at the moment and it would be foolish not to raise some funds.
