By Nate Wolf
Coinbase Global is the house that Bitcoin built. The cryptocurrency is going through a rocky spell right now, and so is Coinbase.
Since Coinbase's direct listing on April 14, 2021 -- still the largest public offering for a crypto company -- shares are down 31%, to $173, from Nasdaq's initial price of $250.
The disappointing returns are in part about fundamentals. The year 2021 remains the company's high watermark for revenue and profit over a full year. But there is another, simpler explanation: Bitcoin has lost around 42% of its value since early October, and that is dragging down Coinbase shares, which have tumbled 55% during the same period.
Coinbase has spent the last five years building what CEO Brian Armstrong calls an "everything exchange," combining crypto trading with equities, custodial services, blockchain infrastructure, and more.
Despite that effort, investors still trade Coinbase stock because of its association with Bitcoin. Its 2021 prospectus came with a prescient warning: "Our operating results have and will significantly fluctuate due to the highly volatile nature of crypto." And they have.
As the leading crypto exchange in the U.S., Coinbase's model was built on trading fees. Transaction revenue comprised 96% of total revenue in 2020, and Bitcoin and Ethereum accounted for 56% of trading volume. Coinbase knew it had to diversify even before its 2021 listing, said Shan Aggarwal, the company's longtime chief business officer.
"Crypto markets are inherently volatile. They always have been historically," Aggarwal told Barron's. "We believe that that will change over time, but it's a nascent technology that goes up and down."
The diversification is happening. Transaction revenue totaled just 57% of total revenue in 2025, and analysts expect that figure to hold steady in 2026.
Coinbase co-founded the USDC stablecoin with Circle Internet Group and is the leading distributor of it. Stablecoin revenue grew 48% to $1.4 billion in 2025, and USDC has more than quintupled in market capitalization over the last five years. Coinbase also has added derivatives, prediction markets, a credit card, equities trading, and more.
But Bitcoin largely determines the stock price. The monthly price movements of Coinbase shares and Bitcoin have a correlation of 0.76 over the last five years, meaning the shares generally move with Bitcoin prices 70% of the time. That correlation has grown stronger, not weaker, in the past 24 months.
"The market is not nuanced," said former AOL CEO Barry Schuler, whose firm DFJ Growth was a Series C investor in Coinbase, "It has indexed [Coinbase] to Bitcoin, which is just silly."
The bullish case is that the "everything exchange" vision will free Coinbase stock to finally trade like its own asset, though even the most optimistic analysts aren't sold on the company becoming an all-in-one financial platform.
For starters, the non-crypto side of Coinbase remains in its infancy. Coinbase doesn't separate results for its non-crypto businesses, but non-transaction revenue in 2025 consisted mostly of stablecoins, blockchain rewards, custodial fees, and interest income.
The competition is also fierce. Robinhood Markets and SoFi Technologies have added similar consumer offerings, including crypto trading and stablecoins. Coinbase still has new markets to tackle because traditional finance is so much larger than crypto, said William Blair analyst Andrew Jeffrey, but differentiation is a challenge.
"I think that if everybody has a super app, nobody has a super app," Jeffrey told Barron's. "I have a Coinbase account. I love my Coinbase account. But I have other financial relationships."
In Coinbase's telling, that may be fine. While the phrase "everything exchange" conjures images of a super-app to which consumers turn for their every financial desire, the truth may be subtler.
Companies such as Stripe, JPMorgan Chase, and BlackRock use Coinbase's blockchain and development infrastructure to deploy their own crypto applications and products. The blockchain layer, Base, is one of Coinbase's 12 products generating at least $100 million in annual revenue.
Essentially, Coinbase is asking investors to envision the future, not to look at the income statement. Crypto bulls believe financial life is undergoing a transition from traditional banking to blockchain rails. Every asset, Aggarwal said, will eventually be turned into digital tokens for fast, round-the-clock transactions and settlement. The wider Coinbase's reach, the greater chance it will profit from this transition.
He has a point. Visa and Mastercard are integrating stablecoins. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust exchange-traded fund is selling like hot cakes. Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange are gearing up for tokenized stocks.
None of these developments are directly related to Bitcoin -- hence why some observers view Coinbase's close connection to Bitcoin prices as unmerited. But it is difficult to imagine crypto taking the world by storm without Bitcoin moving higher. The coin still represents close to 60% of the overall market.
"This whole ecosystem, there's still a strong perception that it is largely driven by Bitcoin," Owen Lau, an analyst at Clear Street, said of Coinbase's offerings.
Fair or not, betting on the long-term growth of crypto is probably a better idea than betting on Coinbase to become your go-to financial app within the next few quarters.
When Schuler offered Coinbase venture funding more than a decade ago, the company envisioned not a single app but a top-to-bottom makeover for the financial services industry. The thesis remains the same in 2026.
"At the end of the day, Coinbase won't be a good stock unless crypto's a much bigger market," Jeffrey, the William Blair analyst, said. If so, "it's hard to bet against the leader in that market."
Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 14, 2026 01:30 ET (05:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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