Coinbase cofounder and CEO Brian Armstrong (Steven Ferdman/Getty Images)

Crypto boom boosts Coinbase Q4 earnings, but stock sinks anyway

“It’s the dawn of a new era for crypto.”

2/14/25 10:26AM

Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the US, reported blowout fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday, thanks to the bull market buoyed by the new administration.

“It’s the dawn of a new era for crypto,” cofounder and CEO Brian Armstrong said in a shareholder letter:

“Crypto’s voice was heard loud and clear in the US elections, and the era of regulation via enforcement that crippled our industry in the US is on its way out. The Trump Administration is moving fast to fulfill its promise of making the US the crypto capital of the planet, and globally, leaders are taking notice and increasing their attention and investment into crypto.”

Revenue jumped to $2.27 billion from $1.20 billion the previous quarter. It reported earnings per share of $4.68. Both figures well exceeded consensus estimates of $1.84 billion and $2.11 EPS, according to FactSet.

The stock got a quick post-earnings boost but ended yesterday flat. Today, it’s fallen more than 6% in early trading. Nic Puckrin, financial analyst and founder of Coin Bureau, said it was surprising given the “stellar results.”

“It may be that Coinbase’s success was overshadowed by Robinhood, which smashed its forecasts even more than Coinbase,” Puckrin said. “These strong results will also put pressure on both Coinbase and Robinhood to keep up the momentum in the new year, and it may be difficult to continue shooting the lights out in the same way over and over again.”

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company.)

Coinbase also benefited from transaction revenue in the fourth quarter, clocking a 172% increase from the previous quarter to $1.6 billion.

Interestingly, 27% of the total transaction revenue stemmed from bitcoin, followed by 14% from XRP and 10% from ethereum.

“Coinbase earnings show that they have benefited massively from the election of Donald Trump,” Alexander Blume, CEO of Two Prime, said. “The prospect of reduced regulatory burden also means that altcoin trading will continue to proliferate for the company.”

Subscription and services revenue “had an outstanding 64% year-over-year to $2.3 billion, driven by USDC, staking, and Coinbase One,” Armstrong said in the earnings call.

In addition, the company said that almost half of its trading customers in the quarter “were either new to Coinbase or resurrected from over a year ago,” underscoring the growing bullish sentiment with retail traders.

“There’s an opportunity to put other products in front of them. Maybe they want to get a loan on their bitcoin. Maybe they want to have a Coinbase card. Maybe they want to earn staking rewards,” Armstrong said. “So there’s more and more products we can put in front of them every time they come back.”

Coinbase went on a massive listing spree in the fourth quarter, adding 13 new tokens, including popular meme coins like Pepe and dogwifhat.

Post-earnings, many analysts raised their price targets for the stock, including those at Barclays, who upped their target to $328 from $282.

Barclays analysts wrote:

“Unsurprisingly, the tone of the call was quite upbeat, with management outlining broad product and geographic ambitions, although we think the next catalyst — which is likely political/regulatory — may take some time to emerge (however, we also acknowledge the clear change in tone from D.C. and think this is a when, not an if).”

Armstrong laid out several priorities for the new year, including making USDC “the number one dollar stablecoin.”

“We are very bullish on stablecoins,” he said on the earnings call. “We’ll be accelerating the market cap growth of USDC with more partnerships.”

The company, which poured millions into the pro-crypto PAC Fairshake to advance more crypto-friendly legislation and candidates, announced it will make additional donations in 2026 and beyond.

“I think we have access to all the relevant decision-makers and folks in government now,” Armstong said. “It doesn’t mean they’re all going to do what we want, but at least we can get meetings and share our point of view.”

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy is a financial journalist who’s written for Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, and Business Insider.

Sage D. Young6/16/26

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.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/16/26

Bitcoin is “caught between flow deterioration and macro relief”

Sage D. Young6/15/26

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:

Ethereum has increased more than 9% to trade above $1,800, amid BitMine Immersion Technologies acquiring $139.2 million worth of ethereum.
XRP and solana have rebounded from multiyear lows, each rising roughly 10%.
HYPE has bounced up 12%.
Dog-based memecoins dogecoin and shiba inu have chased gains of more than 4%.

“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 that’s stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/15/26

Bitcoin hits highest level in 2 weeks following news of Iran deal

Bitcoin crossed $66,500 Monday morning as the broad crypto market welcomed the return of a risk-on mood.