How crypto exchanges like Coinbase make money

QuestDB, an open-source database optimized for market data, offers remarkable ingestion throughput and SQL analytics, making it suitable for tick data analysis. The text explores how cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase generate revenue, primarily through fees charged on trades. Coinbase employs a tiered fee structure to incentivize high trading volumes by offering lower fees to more active traders, distinguishing between Maker and Taker trades to encourage liquidity through passive limit orders. The document uses QuestDB to estimate Coinbase's potential revenue by analyzing BTC-USD trading flows, applying cumulative sum functions and variable fee assumptions to calculate revenue ranges. By comparing trading pairs, it identifies BTC-USD as the primary revenue driver, followed by ETH-USD and SOL-USD, while demonstrating the significant impact of fee structure variations on revenue estimates, allowing real-time analysis of trading performance across different cryptocurrency pairs.