Coinbase Made a $771 Million Profit Last Quarter

Coinbase said it brought in $1.8 billion in revenue during the first three months of the year, up from $191 million in the same period a year ago.

Its listing was a major milestone for an industry that had long been derided as too risky or unsafe for mainstream investors.

Bitcoin and other digital currencies have surged in value in recent months as buyers have found new uses for the assets and as a wave of market manias have gripped the financial world during the pandemic.

On Wednesday, Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and a vocal cryptocurrency supporter, tweeted that Tesla would stop accepting Bitcoin as payment for cars, citing environmental reasons, and Bitcoin’s value dropped.

This week, Coinbase said it was increasing compensation for its employees as it tried to stay competitive and reduce uncertainty.

While current employees will be exempt, Mr. Bastian said that he expected 75 to 80 percent of the airline’s work force to be vaccinated anyway and that he would “strongly encourage” the rest to do so.

On one hand, requiring vaccinations for all employees would lower the anxiety of workers returning to the office and help the country reach herd immunity, which would support the economic rebound.

In January, Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, told employees in a video forum that he supported the idea but added that the carrier could not “realistically be the only company” to do so.

The payment came after hackers last week held up Colonial Pipeline’s business networks with ransomware, a form of malware that encrypts data until the victim pays, and threatened to release it online.

President Biden also declined to answer whether Colonial Pipeline had paid its extortionists in a press briefing on Thursday.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in a separate briefing, “It’s the recommendation of the F.B.I.

DarkSide has tried to distance itself from politics.

Colonial has not shared many details about the incident, or why it was necessary to shut down the pipeline, which other operators sequester from their business operations for safety.

“This is an indicator of why we should pay,” the hackers, called Babuk, said in a post online.

“Product delivery has commenced to all markets we serve,” the pipeline’s operator said Thursday afternoon.

The pipeline, which stretches from Texas to New Jersey and delivers nearly half of the transport fuels for the Atlantic Coast, was shut down because of a ransomware cyberattack on Friday.

Gasoline prices rose by roughly 3 cents in South Carolina and Georgia from Wednesday to Thursday, about half the amount of the increases of the previous few days.

Gasoline supplies vary from state to state along the pipeline, in part because some places have more storage than others.

“They should be reaching full operational capacity as we speak, as I speak to you right now,” Mr. Biden said at the White House.

The Biden administration has temporarily eased the Jones Act, which prohibits foreign vessels from delivering goods from one domestic port to another.

“This waiver will enable the transport of additional gas and jet fuel to ease supply constraints,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.

While the attack was not on the pipeline itself, Colonial shut down both its information systems and the pipeline until it was sure it could safely manage the flow of fuel.

Recently, Gap, the owner of its namesake chain, Old Navy and Athleta, said that it would sell its Intermix and Janie and Jack brands to focus on its core businesses.

Elon Musk has been a big cryptocurrency booster of late, even directing Tesla to buy $1.5 billion in Bitcoin for its corporate treasury earlier this year.

“If one person can dramatically alter spending power, the ‘stable store of value’ criteria of a currency is not met,” Paul Donovan of UBS wrote in a note to clients on Thursday.

Mining Bitcoin is energy-intensive, and the more it is worth, the more power it takes a network of computers to create the tokens, by design.

An entry-level Tesla is worth about one Bitcoin, so the company’s $1.5 billion Bitcoin purchase in February far surpasses the amount of crypto it would collect from car sales for a very long time.

Mr. Musk’s statement said that “Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.” We’ll see whether it made any recent trades when it reports second-quarter results in July.

The return policy for cars bought with Bitcoin worked in Tesla’s favor, stipulating that buyers get back Bitcoin if it’s worth less than the equivalent dollar value at purchase but get back dollars if Bitcoin is worth more.

On Sunday, he announced that SpaceX had taken Dogecoin as payment for shuttling a satellite to the moon.

Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation, climbed 4.2 percent in April from a year earlier, data released on Wednesday showed.

Federal Reserve policymakers have said that they expect the current increase in inflation to be transitory and would not set off a pullback in monetary stimulus.

Oil prices fell on Thursday after Colonial Pipeline said it had begun to restart operations along its massive pipeline, which transports gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from Texas to New Jersey.

Bitcoin prices fell 11 percent to below $49,000, according to CoinDesk, after Elon Musk said Tesla would stop accepting the cryptocurrency as payment for its electric cars.

China’s landmark $2.8 billion antitrust penalty against Alibaba caused the e-commerce giant to report a loss in the latest quarter, its first since going public seven years ago.

Alibaba recorded an operating loss of $1.2 billion for the first three months of the year, the company said on Thursday.

Revenue for the quarter grew by nearly two-thirds from a year before, to $28.6 billion.

China is on a regulatory blitz to curtail what officials describe as unfair and monopolistic business practices by the country’s internet heavyweights.

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