Crypto
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, speaks at the Stand With Crypto rally
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase (Jason Armond/Getty Images)

Benchmark initiates Coinbase coverage with a “buy” rating, stock rises

Riot Platforms also announced a credit facility with the crypto exchange

It’s a good day for Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the US. Benchmark Equity Research has initiated coverage of the company, assigning a “buy” rating and a $252 price target, an over 25% premium from current prices. In addition, bitcoin miner Riot Platforms announced a $100 million credit facility with Coinbase this morning.

Both Riot and Coinbase are up in early trading Wednesday.

Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer wrote:

“[Coinbase], with a domestic market share of ~66%, has established the industry’s most scaled platform ($404bn in assets and 250+ digital assets available for trading as of YE24) by offering a comprehensive suite of products and services aimed at facilitating the adoption and use of digital assets by both retail and institutional investors.”

Palmer added that “the end of the ‘air pocket’ regarding changes to the regulatory treatment of digital assets in the U.S. that has weighed on crypto and COIN shares is a catalyst that is fast approaching.”

This includes looming stablecoin legislation as well as increased adoption of stablecoins, something that “would particularly benefit COIN, which as the developer of the USDC stablecoin in partnership with Circle (Private), will receive a portion of interest income generated from the USDC reserves.”

Palmer also said Coinbase “is particularly well positioned to benefit from the impact of regulatory clarity.”

Meanwhile, Riot Platforms will use the proceeds from its new credit facility with Coinbase “to pursue key strategic initiatives and for general corporate purposes,” according to a press release.

“Riot has entered into its first bitcoin-backed facility, which provides us with non-dilutive funding at an attractive cost of financing,”  Jason Les, CEO of Riot, said in the release.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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