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Comment by perardi | Hacker News Reader

What’s “Apex Crypto”?

I am not being obtuse or sarcastic here. Is it this? http://apexcrypto.com Because that website tells me nothing at all. And past that, Google only shows a few press releases.

But on the consumer crypto coin collector criteria, it still seems like Coinbase has the mind-share. And I imagine they have the reach and scale to be in compliance with regulators, which is what makes them a more attractive investment.

Me? Square’s Cash app is awfully slick, and makes buying drugs…I mean…buying non-fiat currency to stick it to the man all very easy. But I have no idea if people use that feature frequently.

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> What’s “Apex Crypto”?

Apex Crypto is a crypto clearing house, similar to the clearing houses we have for the stock market. Companies like Robinhood, WeBull, SoFi, etc aren't building their crypto trading infrastructure from the ground up. They're plugging into services like this, which handle the exchange between fiat and crypto and a lot of the regulatory compliance. This drastically cuts down the complexities and lowers the barrier to entry for offering buying and selling of crypto.

I don't know all the details of the services they offer, but services like this are the reason it seems like every app under the sun will now let you buy and sell crypto.

>Apex Crypto is a crypto clearing house, similar to the clearing houses we have for the stock market

Is this the same "Apex" that handles clearing for stocks?

I'm not 100% sure. I actually tried to do some research on that a few months ago and couldn't find anything definitive one way or the other (I haven't looked since then).

When I did look, I found some press releases about them partnering, but it was light on details. Based on the name and the fact that their logos now match (they didn't used to), my guess is that they aren't two separate companies.

Or a hell of a clever ruse to cause exactly this confusion by consumers to think it’s more legit than it is. All of this is buyer beware outside of CoinBase. Why? CoinBase and regulators are best buddies. Hard to be dodgy with Big Brother peering into your customer data via IRS subpoenas.

> But I have no idea if people use that feature frequently.

Looks like they made 4.57B$ in revenue with 97M$ in profit [1]. And "We’ve continued to see strong adoption, with 3 million customers [buying bitcoin] through the past year, and in January we saw 1 million new to bitcoin in just one month."

1: https://www.coindesk.com/square-cash-app-bitcoin-revenues-sw...

It's a bit odd to count that as revenue. Like Robinhood counting their entire trade volume of $350 billion as "revenue".

Unfortunately under US accounting rules you have to do it this way in your financial filings.

But bigger brokers (in fact, much more than just brokers) like Merrill ($18B) or Schwab($10B) do not report their transaction volume as revenue.

I'm having trouble finding a good citation, but I think the GP is referring to a quirk of US accounting rules that causes crypto trades specifically to be counted as revenue. The same does not apply to traditional financial market trades, which I think is what your numbers are.

But we are talking about Robinhood here. I doubt they trade $350B worth of crypto.

Weirdly, it seems there are no GAAP accounting rules for cryptocurrencies yet. Apparently there is informal guidance that it should be treated as an intangible asset:

https://news.bloombergtax.com/financial-accounting/tesla-bit...

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