Summary Coinbase Global, Inc. still depends heavily on crypto sentiment, and I expect more short-term weakness if Bitcoin continues its post-Q4 2025 downtrend. Even after dropping more than 50% from its highs, COIN does not yet look cheap enough to offer the kind of asymmetric upside I want. The business is improving underneath that, with 12 products already above $100M in annualized revenue and subscription revenue now above 40% of net revenue. That is why my view is Hold: near-term downside risk still matters, but long-term optionality in stablecoins, product expansion, and diversification remains very real. Introduction My previous coverage on Coinbase Global Inc. ( COIN ) started in April of 2025, where I rated the stock a Strong Buy. Until today, Coinbase has underperformed the S&P 500 index ( SPX ), but in the meantime, especially until my latest writeup in June 2025, in which I issued a more cautious stance and a Hold rating, it was up around 150%. Since then, the stock has dropped almost 50% until today. SA Regulation has become more favorable for Coinbase, but it is not fully resolved. The company recently received conditional OCC approval for a national trust charter, which would strengthen its institutional positioning if finalized, and broader U.S. crypto regulation is moving toward more clarity. Still, today’s New York lawsuit against Coinbase Financial Markets shows that meaningful legal and regulatory friction remains. I believe in Coinbase in the long run. It has strong product innovation upside, and exposure to crypto markets is a plus in years where crypto does well, which I am convinced we will see again in the future. In 2026, however, I do see more weakness for crypto, and even though Coinbase will ultimately reduce the share that its crypto activities take in its business, for now that is still significant and will affect Coinbase stock. Since I cannot perfectly predict timing, I am assigning a Hold rating at this point in time. Developments Crypto is set for lower lows in H2 2026, and Coinbase will ultimately follow. Historically, crypto performs poorly in midterm years, as does the stock market, and they are correlated. So far, crypto has followed the exact pattern of topping out in Q4 2025 (post-halving year) and dropping from there on. Price action remains within one standard deviation of the average of typical midterm year performance. Therefore, I believe it is better to listen to the signals than bluntly invest against them. The ongoing Iran war could be (one of) the catalyst(s) to enable further weakness. The Strait of Hormuz remains disrupted. Iran might not send delegates for negotiation if the blockage persists. Trump has said he does not want to extend the ceasefire, while both Washington and Tehran have accused the other side of violating it. That does not sound like de-escalation at all, yet markets are at all-time highs, despite potential negative impacts on the economy. There are currently no interest rate cuts expected until mid-2027, which could be far too late considering recent labor market weakness . Since crypto lacks fundamentals, technicals play an important role in valuing them. Price has been in a downtrend starting in late 2025. There was one rebound into the 50-week moving average, which got rejected and sold off significantly from there, forming lower lows around $60k. Now we are in such a rebound again, and I expect the same to occur. We might overshoot the current trading zone again, indicated by the two blue trend lines, or even tap the 50-week MA again, but after that, it seems like price will drop again. Historically, Bitcoin (BTC-USD) drops around 80% in bear markets, and even assuming some normalization, let's say a drawdown of 60%; that will bring us down to at least $50k. TradingView The reason why Coinbase will be affected by a weak crypto market stems from the following: Transaction revenues will decline as there is much less euphoria and thereby trading volume in the crypto space. Assets on the balance sheet will be marked down to reflect fallen crypto prices This also affects other income and thereby EPS, which might turn out below analysts' estimates The stock could project these results further into the future, and multiple compression may occur (that could then become a buying opportunity). I do want to make it clear, however, that I am not a bear on COIN at all. There is significant long-term upside optionality behind this stock, and I do recognize that. It is no secret that Coinbase has continuously been expanding their product offerings, which helps reduce crypto cycle dependence. 12 of these products already produce annualized revenues of over $100M, and four of them have been launched in 2025 and another four in 2024, indicating strong innovation momentum. COIN IR Subscription revenues continue to trend higher and now make up over 40% of net revenues as of FY2025. This highlights COIN's ongoing diversification efforts and provides them with stickier and more predictable sales. In theory, that should make the equity more valuable because future cash flows would need to be discounted less. COIN IR One of the most promising business lines is stablecoins. Average USDC held in Coinbase products is at an all-time high. Coinbase makes money from USDC primarily through reserve income shared with Circle, so rising balances directly support revenue. More broadly, stablecoins are increasingly being used for payments and settlement, with Visa reporting a $3.5B annualized stablecoin settlement run rate and the overall stablecoin market now above $320B . COIN IR Altogether, this can help create a strong flywheel for Coinbase, where they leverage their trust, causing higher AOP and product innovation, from which they can monetize better. COIN IR Valuation In my view, analysts' estimates can be largely disregarded for Coinbase, considering earnings surprise history . The combination of low trailing multiples and personal conviction for crypto and Coinbase as a business to perform well sooner rather than later is a better strategy. A long investment time horizon can work for Coinbase, but it is likely to include massive volatility swings. I would therefore rather buy during low sentiment and low multiples while having high conviction, just like in April of 2025. Despite not being historically high, COIN's P/S ratio does not reflect pessimism like in the previous cycle's midterm year, 2022. Instead, it is somewhat in between euphoric highs and depressed lows, making it neither particularly compelling to buy nor to sell here. COIN's weekly chart is neither particularly bullish nor very bearish. We can see price bouncing off strong support around $145, which has provided a base multiple times before. Since the low in early February, it seems like price is in an uptrend, though not a very clear one. RSI is creating higher highs and lower lows, which is bullish. Since early March, however, price has struggled in the $200-$215 region, creating significant upside wicks. This is also where the 200-week exponential moving average lies, potentially indicating a long-term zone price cannot convincingly close above for now. Throughout 2024 and 2025 (Bitcoin bull market years), trading Coinbase would have worked particularly well when trading weekly breakouts, as portrayed below. That setup offered a great risk-to-reward ratio. We could be working our way to breaking out of the most recent trend line this year, so that could be an idea to keep watching. TradingView Conclusion In my view, Coinbase has great next-cycle and long-term prospects. However, it is highly volatile and remains largely dependent on crypto markets, which themselves depend mostly on Bitcoin. I do see more weakness this year for Bitcoin, where one could get a better entry point into the stock, one with true asymmetrical upside. Still, selling now may be a little late. It's important to mention that this is a temporary thesis. I do think Coinbase will fare well in the long run, but I believe it could have to endure a bit more adversity this year, as opposed to many analysts who believe the bottom is already in. Since there are valid arguments for the latter as well, however, I am rating the stock a Hold instead of a Sell, so investors that already have exposure can benefit from potential near-term upside.

2026-04-22 14:40

More on Cango Inc. Cango Inc. 2025 Q4 - Results - Earnings Call Presentation Cango Inc. (CANG) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript Cango receives NYSE non-compliance notice Cango Inc. GAAP EPS of -$0.80 misses by $0.53, revenue of $179.45M in-line Historical earnings data for Cango Inc.

2026-04-22 13:25

More on Strategy, iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF IBIT: Why I Stepped To The Side (Technical Analysis) (Rating Downgrade) Stocks From Liberation Day To Iran War Strategy: Down 77% And Still Isn't Cheap Enough Capital Group raises bet on MicroStrategy with $747M purchase Strategy acquires 34K BTC using an ATM-funded $2.54B raise

2026-04-22 11:08

More on Strategy, American Funds Fundamental Investors R3 Strategy: Down 77% And Still Isn't Cheap Enough Strategy: I'm Gonna Knock It Out The Park (Rating Upgrade) Strategy: Soon A Long, But Not Yet Strategy acquires 34K BTC using an ATM-funded $2.54B raise Nasdaq hits record high after Iran opens Strait of Hormuz

2026-04-22 09:48

Summary Onchain oil perpetuals have grown more than 100× in six months, with daily volume peaking at $1.7 billion in April 2026. During peak geopolitical risk, traders were paying 400% annualized funding cost to bet against rising oil prices, a signal that makes no sense until you understand the mechanism of crypto oil perps. Traders are shorting the perp to arbitrage a scheduled oracle step-down during the monthly contract roll. New onchain protocols are now emerging to hedge the one risk that makes this trade uncertain: funding rate volatility. Crude Goes OnChain Crypto oil perpetuals have grown more than 100× in six months, marking one of the fastest expansions in the decentralized derivatives space. Hyperliquid's ( HYPE-USD ) HIP-3 upgrade, launched in late 2025, enables anyone to deploy a permissionless perpetual market tied to any external price feed. Oil was one of the first commodities to find substantial adoption. The Rapid Growth of Volume and Open Interest of Crude Crypto Perps Source: Loris Tools The March 2026 Iran-Hormuz escalation promoted the surge in crypto crude perps. Daily volume reached over $6B with open interest climbing to over $900M in early April. Basics about Perps Contract A perpetual contract — or perp — is a derivative that lets traders take leveraged long or short exposure to an asset without ever holding it or managing an expiry date. Unlike a standard futures contract, which settles on a fixed date and requires the holder to roll forward to maintain exposure, a perp has no expiry. It stays open indefinitely, as long as the trader's margin supports the position. The mechanism that keeps a perp anchored to its underlying is the funding rate — a periodic payment exchanged between longs and shorts, calibrated to the gap between the perp's mark price and the oracle price of the underlying. When the perp trades at a premium to the oracle, longs pay shorts; the payment incentivizes selling and pulls the mark price back down. When the perp trades at a discount, shorts pay longs; the payment incentivizes buying and pushes the mark price back up. A strongly positive funding rate signals crowded long positioning; strongly negative signals crowded shorts. The crude perps infrastructure in crypto is very different from the traditional market. In the traditional market, a trader wanting oil exposure must open a brokerage account, post margin in dollars, and manage monthly contract rolls manually, all within exchange hours. Crypto perps change the access equation entirely. Margin is posted in stablecoins, positions settle in cash, and markets run continuously. No barrels, no brokers, no roll calendar to manage. The Anomaly: −400% Negative Funding Rate in a Rising Oil Market In early April 2026, something unusual appeared. The WTIOIL-USDC contract on Hyperliquid was paying between −200% and −400% annualized funding to longs, approximately −1.1% per day, just to hold a short position. The OI-Weighted Funding Rate reached -0.4% on April 9, roughly over -400% Annualized Funding Rate. The geopolitical backdrop made this reading look paradoxical. WTI had surged above $110 per barrel in late March as the US-Iran conflict threatened to sever traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. A two-week ceasefire announced on April 7 triggered WTI's largest single-day decline since 2020, with prices dropping more than 16% to close at $94.41. But the relief was fragile. By April 9, Iran was accusing the US of violating ceasefire terms, Israel continued strikes on Lebanon threatening to unravel the truce, and WTI had already rebounded back above $97. Under standard perp logic, negative funding should mean one thing: everyone was shorting oil. In a normal perp, crowded short positioning drives mark price below oracle price, pushing funding negative — shorts pay longs to compensate. At −400% annualized, the implication would be that crypto traders had collectively front-run a complete ceasefire resolution, pricing in an imminent oil price collapse while the physical market was still in near-record backwardation and tankers remained stranded in the Gulf. Crypto traders were so confident in this shorting direction and were willing to pay 1.1% of the funding fee to long position. Of course, that was not what was happening. The −400% funding was not a geopolitical call. It was a structural artifact, produced not by bearish conviction, but by the specific way Hyperliquid's oil oracle is designed to behave during a monthly futures roll. What Funding Rate Measures in a Commodity Perp Perpetual contracts have no expiry. They maintain alignment to an underlying reference through a continuous funding payment exchanged between longs and shorts, calibrated to the gap between mark price (where the perp trades) and oracle price (the external reference). When mark trades below oracle, funding is negative: shorts pay longs. When mark trades above, longs pay shorts. In Hyperliquid's WTI perp, the oracle tracks the CME front-month futures contract. WTI crude futures expire monthly. During the roll window (business days 5–10), the oracle index transitions from the expiring front-month contract to the next month's contract. In a steep backwardation, this transition involves a scheduled price step-down baked into the perpetual's oracle. In the above chart, each contract month represents oil delivered at a later date, and the market prices that future oil progressively cheaper, because the geopolitical shock driving the near-term premium is expected to be temporary. This is textbook backwardation: spot scarcity bid up, future supply assumed to normalize. For example, assuming the contract shifts from CLK26 at $111.50 to CLM26 at $96.00, a mandatory $15.50 step-down, executed mechanically across roughly five trading days at approximately $3.10 per day. The oracle's destination is known in advance. The path is deterministic; there is no price discovery involved. This is where the arbitrage lives. A trader who shorts the perp at the current mark and simultaneously buys CLM26 on CME as a hedge locks in the convergence gap as a near-certain profit. The oracle will step down to CLM26's price regardless of what happens to oil directionally. The CME long hedges away any outright price move. When a large number of arbitrageurs execute simultaneously, short positions in the perp market become severely oversupplied, the mark price persistently trades below the oracle price, and the funding rate goes into deep negative territory. Therefore, under this combination of extreme backwardation and contract roll mechanics, negative funding is not a market sentiment signal; it is the direct result of arbitrage behavior. Convergence is Certain; Funding is Not The convergence gain is deterministic; the oracle will step down on schedule. However, the funding cost is not. When the arbitrage becomes well-known and more traders pile in on the short side, the perp mark is pushed even further below oracle. That widens the funding rate further, and every short already in the trade pays more. The more crowded the trade, the higher the cost for everyone holding it. A trader who entered expecting to collect $15.50 in convergence can find most of it consumed by funding costs before the roll completes. But there is no shortage of innovation in the crypto space. Boros (by Pendle) takes the floating funding rate on perpetual futures and turns it into a tradeable, hedgeable onchain instrument. Bottom Line The traditional oil market has operated on the same structural rails for decades: CME futures, physical delivery contracts, OTC swaps arranged through prime brokers, and trading hours that stop at weekends. Participation has been gated by infrastructure, brokerage accounts, and margin in dollars. Onchain oil perps dismantle that gate. Any trader with a stablecoin wallet can now take leveraged exposure to WTI around the clock. But the more significant development is not access; it is the new layer of financial products being built on top of the perp structure. The oracle roll mechanism, which looked like a quirk, turns out to be a yield source. The funding rate, which looked like a cost, turns out to be a tradable instrument. Boros is the first protocol to tokenize that instrument explicitly, but it points toward a broader pattern: every structural feature of onchain commodity markets that differs from TradFi is a potential basis for a new financial product. Disclaimer: The information provided herein does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other sort of advice, and should not be treated as such. All content set out below is for informational purposes only. Original Post

2026-04-22 09:45

More on Riverwater Sustainable Value Strategy Q1 2026 Portfolio Activity Coherent: A Buy Driven By Robust AI Datacenter Optics Demand Century Aluminum: A Decade-Long Growth Runway Convenience store Yesway prices $280M IPO at lower range of $20 per share Japan posts second straight trade surplus in March but misses ¥1.1T forecast; exports hit record high

2026-04-22 08:28

2026-04-21 22:45

More on SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust Dow Jones And U.S. Stock Market Outlook - Fed's Warsh And Ceasefire-End Trigger Market Double Tops Putting In A Stock Market Top Software Is 2026's Strongest Buy Opportunity: Here's Why Fed Chair race in focus: Warsh is grilled and traders signal delay Warsh testimony: Traders bet on themes around inflation, rates, and AI

2026-04-21 21:22

Summary Over the past few weeks, Bitcoin (BTC-USD) has moved out of a period of pressure and into a recovery phase. Although its price action is still being shaped not only by crypto-specific factors but also by the broader macro backdrop. After pulling back to the $75.6K area, the cryptocurrency is once again testing resistance near $76.9K, supported by demand from institutional investors. By Anton Kharitonov Over the past few weeks, Bitcoin ( BTC-USD ) has moved out of a period of pressure and into a recovery phase, although its price action is still being shaped not only by crypto-specific factors but also by the broader macro backdrop. After pulling back to the $75.6K area, the cryptocurrency is once again testing resistance near $76.9K, supported by demand from institutional investors. Institutional capital remains the main source of support. ETF flows, large-scale buying, and capital reallocation toward BTC are driving the current price structure rather than retail participation. This reflects a broader regime shift: Bitcoin is becoming less dependent on traditional crypto cycles and is increasingly behaving like an alternative macro asset sensitive to liquidity, interest rates, and large-fund positioning. The macro environment remains the second most important factor after ETF demand. The Fed’s hawkish tone, the prospect of higher rates for longer, and Bitcoin’s sensitivity to geopolitical risk continue to shape short-term prospects. Geopolitical tensions work in both directions: they raise risk aversion, but they also increase interest in BTC as an alternative asset amid uncertainty in commodity markets and inflation expectations, even if its safe haven properties are still debatable. A further positive factor is the gradual decline in regulatory uncertainty. The convergence between SEC and CFTC approaches, along with broader access to digital asset infrastructure from traditional banks, is reducing the structural regulatory discount on BTC. This is not a short-term catalyst, but it does create a more favorable foundation for continued institutional inflows. As long as Bitcoin remains firmly above $75K, the outlook stays constructive, and bulls may attempt another test of the stated resistance. A breakout above it would open the way toward $78.4K-79K. On the other hand, a loss of $75K would raise the risk of a break below $74K and a decline toward $72K-71K. Original Post Editor's Note: The summary bullets for this article were chosen by Seeking Alpha editors.

2026-04-21 21:05