Coinbase’s Chief Product Officer issued a mea culpa on Thursday, a day after the popular investing platform was among a number of venues that faced glitches and outages during a brutal crypto selloff.
CPO Surojit Chatterjee said Coinbase Global apologized for the “unreliability of our site/apps,” and pledged to “make our system robust and be ready for the next time,” in comments made via Twitter.
The comments come after several large crypto platforms, including Binance, experienced outages Wednesday morning, amid a crypto rout that saw bitcoin
BTCUSD,
tumble to a nadir around $30,000 only to parse those losses substantially in the span of a few hours.
Coinbase is the largest publicly traded exchange in the U.S., and was out of commission during the more intense portion of Wednesday’s selling, showing an error message on its home page. Its app was also unavailable for trading.
Although, the platform did come back on line, its outage was partially blamed for helping to amplify turbulence in crypto markets that swept into altcoins, including dogecoin
DOGEUSD,
and Ether on the Ethereum blockchain
ETHUSD,
For Coinbase’s part, the company has seen its shares struggle since listing on the Nasdaq Inc. last month.
Also read: Why is crypto crashing? Will bitcoin prices ever recover? Here’s what traders and investors say.
At last check, Coinbase shares were up 4.2% at around $234, but have decline more than 20% since the platform’s debut. Shares of Coinbase were down more than 9% so far this week, as a number of headlines appear to be buffeting crypto. The Treasury Department announced this week it will require businesses with transfers worth $10,000 in crypto or more to report them to the Internal Revenue Service, in an attempt to provide stricter guidelines on complying with existing tax laws.
Coinbase’s weekly declines were currently more severe than the broader market, despite its Thursday turnaround. By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
is down 0.7% for the week, the S&P 500
SPX,
is looking at a weekly slide of 0.2%, and the technology-laden Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP,
is up 0.8% so far this week.
Still, a number of analysts are upbeat on the crypto-focused company. Wedbush’s Moshe Katri said the cryptocurrency trading platform’s business model is “more resilient” than perceived. The analyst started coverage of Coinbase with an outperform rating and $275 share-price target, calling the company the one-stop-shop ecosystem for crypto.
Separately, fellow bull Oppenheimer analyst Owen Lau, who rates Coinbase outperform with a $434 price target, came out in defense of the company, saying the stock’s recent selloff is overdone.
“Our analysis shows that at current valuation, [Coinbase’s stock] has not only priced in a substantial fee cut but also crypto winter has arrived,” Lau wrote in a research note. “We continue so see a sharp dislocation between [Coinbase’s] fundamentals and its share price.”
Some hold a more subdued view of the company. David Trainer, CEO of New Constructs, an investment research firm, speculated that Coinbase could see its shares fall sharply from current levels due to new entrants.
“With more competition expected in the cryptocurrency trading space, we expect Coinbase’s revenues and profits to taper off, which means the company will likely not be able to justify a valuation higher than $100 per share,” he wrote last week.