The plunge in cryptocurrency prices since April doesn’t appear to have knocked Coinbase (COIN) off its stride so far in the second quarter.
“I think that those who were new to this space may have under estimated the volatility that we can see in this market. But crypto is volatile, and we have to remember this is a really young industry and a very nascent asset class. So while we have seen a lot of volatility, we have been dealing with this since the very beginning,” said Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas on Yahoo Finance Live. “And the momentum that we are seeing is continuing. There’s a lot of interest in crypto. We shared it on our first earnings call just recently, with the momentum we saw in Q1 had continued into Q2 and we are optimistic at this point that we are going to see similar levels of excitement in volume on our platform that we saw in the first quarter.”
Coinbase shares rose nearly 1% Wednesday morning as Haas effectively maintained the company’s second quarter guidance.
The crypto exchange said earlier in May that its performance up to that point in the second quarter suggested it would meet or exceed its first quarter results. Coinbase added that it expected trading volume to meet or slightly exceed first quarter levels.
Haas’ commentary (and bullish coverage launched this week by analysts at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan) will likely go a long way in shoring up confidence in Coinbase’s stock amid the sharp pullback in crypto prices.
At $38,605, bitcoin prices have crashed about 40% from their mid-April peak of $64,829. Ether has nosedived as well, bringing its drop from an all-time high this month to roughly 34%.
Shares of Coinbase have been swept up into the sell-off. At $243, the stock continues to trade below the $250 reference price for its April direct listing.
“We believe Coinbase, the most popular consumer-facing cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., is positioned to be a primary beneficiary of the increased adoption of Bitcoin and other digital assets as it continues to scale in the U.S. and internationally. At the same time, the company has several avenues through which it could build upon its first-mover advantage as an on-ramp for mainstream crypto investors by diversifying its revenue stream away from transaction fees and leveraging its increasingly robust platform for institutional investors,” said BTIG analyst Mark Palmer in a recent client note.
Palmer has a Buy rating and $500 price target on Coinbase shares.
Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.
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