Topic: [2018-11-08] $43 Million in Bitcoin Trades Help Square Beat Q3 Earnings Estimat (Read 113 times)

Square, the merchant payment service provider which thrives on its mobile card readers and applications, has posted its third-quarter shareholder report, and it includes $43 million in bitcoin revenue.
Slim Margins on Bitcoin

Overall, they’ve made 51 percent more than they did last year up to this point, and revenue is 68 percent better than they did during the same quarter of last year. BTC sales are one of its smallest components, but they still represent a notable portion of total revenue — around 5 percent.

They mention that their adjusted revenue figures reflect a deduction of bitcoin transaction costs, noting that:

    “We deduct bitcoin costs because we consider our role in the bitcoin transactions to be facilitating customer access to bitcoin. Since we only apply a small margin to the market cost of bitcoin when we sell bitcoin to customers, and we have no control over the cost of bitcoin in the market, which tends to be volatile, we believe deducting bitcoin costs is a better reflection of the economic benefits as well as the Company’s performance from the bitcoin transactions.”

Actual profits on the BTC revenues were therefore roughly $500,000, about 20 percent more than what they made in the previous quarter on the same product. Square has yet to add a variety of cryptos to its offerings, but when or if it decides to do so, we expect these revenues to increase as they can likely have higher margins on cryptos that are perceived as harder to acquire using traditional means.

CCN | https://www.ccn.com/43-million-in-bitcoin-trades-help-square-beat-earnings-estimates/