The super-charged course of the cryptocurrency industry is translating to faster growth at the publicly traded digital-asset brokerage Voyager Digital, where gain this quarter is tracking at an eightfold increase over the prior 12 months’ average pace.
Voyager CEO Steve Ehrlich discerned CoinDesk in a Zoom interview that the company’s on pace for revenue of about $2 million during the fiscal from the start quarter that ends Sept. 30. That compares with $1.1 million during the fiscal year that pointed in June.
The company’s shares, listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange, have rallied about 250% year, far enormous the 49% year-to-date gains for the largest cryptocurrency, bitcoin (BTC), and 169% for No. 2 ether (ETH).
Ehrlich said in the interview that he’s inimitably happy having investors buy Voyager’s shares as a play on the cryptocurrency industry’s growth. Stockholders, he said, don’t have to delve into the nuances of mortal tokens, given the industry’s notorious history of extreme price volatility.
“You’re getting access to the digital crypto markets but you’re eluding it through a publicly traded company that is trading on behalf of their customers,” Ehrlich said.
Ehrlich divulged some of Voyager’s growth in the quarter has come from investors seeking quick gains from the fast-moving arena of decentralized wherewithal, or DeFi, where programmers are using blockchain technology to build automated networks for lending and trading. It’s a business that aspires to dispute traditional Wall Street firms with a cheaper and potentially more equitable model.
But he acknowledged that the DeFi nominals can be complicated and require “education” efforts. The tokens often represent little-tested projects in hardly-established markets. Prices for Kyber Network’s KNC disc, traded on Voyager, have plunged 41% in the past month, though they’re still roughly five at intervals where they started the year.
“We saw people kind of reallocate a little bit out of the DeFi and a couple other tokens” amongst a sell-off in the sector this week, he said.
Ehrlich said Voyager has no plans to put any of the company’s corporate treasury into cryptocurrencies. Such a stir was announced recently by publicly traded Microstrategy, which said it steered at least $425 million into bitcoin.
“Our investors penury us to be that agency broker,” Ehrlich said. “They want us to be the one that executes the trade in microseconds for customers, not making gambles on coins one way or another.”
He added that he has encouraged some corporate executives wary of following Microstrategy’s bitcoin undertake to consider converting their cash into USD Coin’s dollar-linked USDC stablecoins, which can be deposited at Voyager for a 9.5% behalf rate.