Coinbase rises as William Blair says crypto weakness is priced in

Coinbase shares climbed Wednesday even after William Blair lowered its expectations for the crypto exchange’s future revenue and profit. For retail investors, the move shows how stocks can rise on bad-looking numbers when analysts believe the market has already punished the company enough.

Coinbase, ticker COIN, and Circle, ticker CRCL, each gained roughly 3% to 4% after William Blair maintained its outperform rating on Coinbase, according to the firm’s note cited by Yahoo Finance and StreetInsider. An outperform rating means the analyst expects a stock to do better than a relevant benchmark or peer group, though it is still only an opinion.

William Blair cut its 2026 revenue estimate for Coinbase by 12% and its 2027 revenue estimate by 13%. The firm also reduced its adjusted EBITDA forecasts for both years by 34%. Adjusted EBITDA is a company profit measure that strips out interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and certain other items, giving analysts a cleaner view of operating performance.

Analysts Andrew Jeffrey and Adib Choudhury said Coinbase earnings should hit a low point in the second half of 2026 before improving in 2027, as spot crypto trading volumes recover. Spot trading means buying or selling crypto for immediate delivery, and it remains a key driver of Coinbase revenue because the company earns fees when users trade.

William Blair expects Coinbase’s total trading volume to drop about 44% this year to $669 billion, then rise more than 32% in 2027. The firm said the current crypto downturn differs from 2022 because spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds now exist, institutional flows are larger, and crypto regulation has developed since then.

Why analysts are looking past the revenue cuts

Coinbase has fallen nearly 30% this year, while Bitcoin has dropped about 26%, according to the figures cited in the analyst commentary. William Blair’s view is that much of the risk from weak crypto activity is already reflected in Coinbase’s share price.

The firm also pointed to parts of Coinbase that could lessen its dependence on basic spot trading. Those include Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 network, which is a blockchain built to process transactions more cheaply and quickly on top of another blockchain. William Blair also cited retail derivatives and prediction markets as potential contributors. Retail derivatives alone crossed $200 million on an annualized basis in the first quarter, according to Decrypt.

Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has also been under pressure. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2025 at $31 a share and has fallen about 20% since January, according to the reported figures.

Other analysts were less upbeat on the near term. Piper Sandler analyst Patrick Moley lowered his Coinbase price target to $155 from $170 while keeping a neutral rating. He pointed to prediction markets and perpetual futures as major issues for the second quarter and warned that investors would be focused on the threat from perpetual futures heading into the third quarter. Perpetual futures are crypto derivatives that let traders bet on price moves without an expiration date.

Bitcoin’s chart is also getting attention. John Bollinger, the technical analyst who created Bollinger Bands, flagged a fractal W double-bottom pattern on Bitcoin’s daily chart. Bollinger Bands are volatility lines plotted around a moving average, and traders use them to watch for potential changes in price behavior. Bollinger said completion of the W pattern would confirm a shift in trend, according to the cited commentary.

This story draws on original reporting from Decrypt.