Public Keys is a weekly roundup from Decrypt that tracks the key publicly traded crypto companies. This week: Robinhood and MARA Holdings were the only two crypto stocks that ended the week in the green; Coinbase gets competition for its custody biz; and why GDP isn’t all that interesting for asset managers.
Green shoots for Robinhood and MARA
Trading platform Robinhood and Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings managed to end what’s been another rollercoaster five days for markets higher than they were this time last week.
Robinhood, which trades under the HOOD ticker on the Nasdaq, was changing hands for $42.75 two hours before the closing bell, after having gained 5.8% since last Friday.
And this is the same week that Morgan Stanley downgraded the stock, citing concerns over the company’s reliance on transaction-based revenues. The bank reduced its price target from $90 to $40.
So what is going in Robinhood’s favor? It’s likely not just down to the fact that President Donald Trump assured investors it was a “GREAT TIME TO BUY” right before he paused tariffs for 90 days and sent markets soaring.
Wall Street analysts have flagged HOOD as a company that’ll experience some short-term pain as retail investors are likely to be hardest hit by economic woes, but they’re still optimistic about long-term potential.
And, as an aside: It’ll be a while yet before HOOD shares are directly competing with eToro as a chill sweeps across all the would-be IPOs in 2025. Its rival, eToro, has been saying since the start of the year that it wanted to go public. It plans to use ETOR as its ticker, according to an SEC filing last week.
Meanwhile, MARA, which also trades on the Nasdaq, was up 4.5% compared to last Friday and trading for $12.47 before markets closed.
Virtually all crypto stocks spiked when President Donald Trump put a 90-day pause on punishing tariffs. But the Florida-based Bitcoin miner is the only one to still be looking better now than it was a week ago.
The company reported a 6% month-to-month uptick in its Bitcoin production during March and captured 5.8% of possible miner rewards paid out during the period. But more importantly: It estimates it’ll complete its 40 megawatt Ohio data center in a few weeks.
It’s yet another step towards vertical integration that could help lower operating costs—which is critically important for Bitcoin miners these days. The Bitcoin network difficulty just experienced a big spike, meaning that mining rigs will have to work harder to compete for each new block on the network, with each block paying out around $260,000 to the lucky miner.
Coinbase gets custody competition
Earlier this week, BlackRock added Anchorage Digital as an additional custodian for its iShares Bitcoin Trust and iShares Ethereum Trust spot ETFs. The funds trade on the Nasdaq under the IBIT and ETHA tickers, respectively.
It sounds like a big deal, right? After all, the iShares crypto funds account for $45 billion worth of BTC and $1.7 billion worth of ETH.
But as Decrypt reporter Andre Beganski found out, Coinbase’s custody business isn’t exactly raking in the dough.
Following the approval of spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs in 2024, Coinbase’s custodial fee revenue doubled to $142 million from $70 million the year prior, according to its most recent shareholder letter.
To put that in perspective, it accounts for roughly 6% of the $2.3 billion in revenue Coinbase saw in Q4. The company’s largest single source of revenue remains the almighty dollar—or, rather, the Circle’s dollar-pegged USDC stablecoin. That’s because Coinbase has a deal with Circle to evenly split the interest earned on the cash and cash equivalents backing USDC stablecoins.
GDP Is Old News
Is the U.S. heading into a recession? And if it is, is the GDP really the best metric to figure that out? Yes and no.
There’s a lot of attention being paid to the U.S. Commerce Department’s upcoming gross domestic product report—but really, it’s driven by political circles. Any sitting president would love to have a Great Big GDP number to point at, like an A+ on a report card.
The GDP essentially tallies up receipts for goods and services that have already been sold. It’s a lagging indicator that, as CoinShares Head of Research James Butterfill puts it, doesn’t warrant a lot of emphasis when asset managers are trying to gauge the health of the economy.
And even if the Q1 GDP report doesn’t show that the country has entered a recession—Butterfill suspects it won’t—there are lots of other troubling indicators flashing red at the moment.
“Notably, consumer confidence has dropped sharply, the NFIB small business surveys show increasing strain, and bankruptcy filings are up 13% year-over-year—approaching levels last seen during the COVID crisis,” Butterfill told Decrypt. “These challenges are likely to be compounded by the ongoing turmoil surrounding the liberation trade tariff dispute, though its impact will likely only become visible in Q2 data.”
But the purchasing managers’ index, or PMI, is a forward-looking indicator that’s based on surveys. So what’s that saying? The S&P Global PMI showed growth in March, but a portion of it was a strategic increase in production to get ahead of Trump’s tariff tirade.
S&P also found that, among those surveyed, business confidence has “deteriorated across the board” virtually everywhere. Except Russia!
Other Keys
- Profits, where? Strategy notified investors that it’s taken a $6 billion hit on the Bitcoin it purchased in Q1. Keep in mind, MSTR bought Bitcoin four times in January. Three out of those four buys were when BTC was still up above $100,000. That means the Q1 profits it might have reported during its upcoming earnings are in danger.
- A $40 million slap on the wrist: Block, Inc. paid $40 million to settle a New York Department of Financial Services lawsuit over “significant failures” with its anti-money laundering compliance program. We wouldn’t say shareholders are overjoyed, though. The company, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the XYZ ticker, is still ending the week trading for $53.75, about 1.9% lower than it was last Friday.
- Sit tight: The Bakkt class action lawsuit, alleging that the company did not sufficiently warn investors how dependent it was on its crypto services business for revenue, won’t have its pre-trial hearing until August.
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