The crypto boom has faded but this charting company is still basking in its glow

US startup TradingView lets people make their own financial charts for stocks, currencies, and crypto assets.
The company's users quadrupled over the last year thanks to booming interest in cryptocurrencies.
The crypto boom has cooled but TradingView says customers are still active and have moved into using it for other assets like FX and stocks.
It suggests crypto may have acted like a "gateway drug" for some retail investors, getting them into more traditional financial investment products.

LONDON — The cryptocurrency price boom is long gone but many companies are still profiting from the surge in business that it bought.

US charting startup TradingView saw a surge in sign-ups last year as investors piling into crypto turned to the tool to help with technical analysis. TradingView, which has a freemium subscription model, supports over two dozen cryptocurrency exchanges and has accepted bitcoin as payment for 5 years.

Customers almost quadruple from 2 million last June to over 8 million as the price of bitcoin and other crypto assets surged almost 1,000% against the dollar.

Much of that price rally has faded but Rauan Khassan, international expansion manager at TradingView, told Business Insider: "Unlike the decline that's been seen on most cryptocurrency exchanges, our user base continued growing."

Rauan Khassan TradingView International Expansion Manager.JPG Crypto volumes have fallen in line with the price and many crypto businesses have reported a pull-back in revenues. But Khassan said TradingView has seen no drop-off in active users or revenue.

"We reached 7 million in December when the crypto market peaked," Khassan said. "Since then we are growing, definitely at a lower pace, but it remains in a positive territory."

Interestingly, he said that many customers who came for crypto were now moving towards other asset classes like stocks and foreign exchange. It suggests that crypto may have acted as a gateway drug for many customers.

"Users who initially came for trading opportunities in the crypto class, they actually move to covering FX," Khassan said. "In the end, most of those people were interested not in supporting the market itself, they were interested in the profit opportunity.

"As long as they see the market is not booming anymore and they get more and more doubtful, they are looking for more and more short-term profit opportunities, which are in more liquid markets."

Trading Views is not alone in crystallising the crypto business bump in this way. Plus500, a "contract for difference" provider that lets people effectively bet on asset prices, saw huge numbers of new sign up at the end of last year driven by cryptocurrencies. It said in February of this year: "It has been notable that these customers have traded the more traditional financial instruments as well as cryptocurrencies, implying that these newer customers will continue to trade even if cryptocurrencies lose favour."

TradingView is cash positive but Khassan won't say if it's profitable. The company raised a $37 million Series B funding round in May and Khassan said: "We definitely got more attention thanks to the crypto boom."

But he added: "I think one of the important points that made our investment confirmed was we were able to display in four consecutive months after crypto peaked [that] our community and our audience keeps growing independent from the crypto factor only.

"We are a survivor compared to the crypto scene, compared to crypto exchanges or crypto only projects. Their performance and activity is directly correlated to the performance of crypto itself. We see our key difference as being a universal platform."

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