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Coinbase’s secret sauce isn’t so secret
BTIG’s Andrew Harte doubled down on Coinbase with a Buy rating and a $240 price target, basically saying the market is still sleeping on one of the company’s most interesting growth engines: institutional.
That business isn’t just a side hustle for big trading desks anymore. Harte said it’s now an increasingly important contributor to growth, with around 20% of total revenue coming from institutional clients. Think asset managers, banks, ETF providers, fintechs, and payments platforms — the sort of customers that make a business look less like a crypto casino and more like infrastructure.
Phase 2: from crypto rails to payment rails
The real story here is Coinbase’s push beyond plain-vanilla crypto trading. The analyst outlined a three-step playbook:
- build the core institutional crypto platform
- expand into payments and stablecoins
- eventually reach tokenized assets and continuous markets
That middle step is where things get spicy. Harte said Coinbase now has more than 200 institutional clients paying for access to its technology stack through the Coinbase Developer Platform, and he pointed to the company’s partnership with Amazon as a big validation point for that strategy.
Why investors should care
If Coinbase can turn institutional and payments infrastructure into a recurring, sticky business, the stock story changes a lot. You’re no longer just betting on crypto trading volumes and the mood swings of Bitcoin; you’re betting on Coinbase becoming a picks-and-shovels layer for digital money.
Big picture: Coinbase is trying to graduate from being the place people trade crypto to being the plumbing underneath it. That’s a much bigger market — and a much cleaner story for investors if it works.