INCOMING AND OUTGOING:
Monthly trading fees: $30,000
Monthly expenses:
Yep, they're definitely making minimal profit...
Monthly trading fees: $30,000
Monthly expenses:
Yep, they're definitely making minimal profit...
If they're only taking in $30k a month in fees than I would think they are not even making minimal profit.
They probably have a dozen employees. If they pay them an average of $2,500/month ($30,000/year) then they're at breakeven on wages alone, never mind rent, utilities etc.
And they're in Calgary, so they're probably paying more than $2,500/month.
They would need to raise their fees or increase their trade volume just to survive. Makes more sense to buy bitcoin and sit around waiting for the price to go up.
seems unlikely they would need 12 people on the team. maybe when they built the site they needed a few dev and security guys, but with the exchange in operation it could be upkept by 2-3 guys with enough technical skills. maybe 4-5 people depending how the ATMs are handled
do they even have a physical office? I don't see any sort of location listed on the website. re: utilities, theres likely $10,000 worth of server gear that costs <$800/month to host somewhere
realistically:
5 employees x $3k/month = $15k/month
putting 5%/month towards recouping upfront costs = ~$5k/month
paying to host webservers and phonelines = ~$1k/month
business insurance (i imagine they have some form of coverage for hot/cold wallet theft) = $5k/month (just a guess based on 30k worth of trade fees)
thats a total of $20-30k/month, so while i doubt they were operating at a loss, the margins may be a little thin. *granted, there would still be 5 people making a decent salary*
Some important points:
They have more than 5 employees. They scaled back significantly a few months back but they still have more than that.
Their employees are spread out around the country.
They have no office to pay for.
Their servers are likely to cost way more than 1k/month.
No real insurance policy will insure bitcoin deposits at this point.