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Coinbase posts $394m quarterly loss

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Coinbase posts $394m quarterly loss

The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase ended the first quarter of 2026 with a net loss of $394.1m. 

A year earlier, it made a $66m profit for the same period. 

The main driver was a market correction: the firm’s investment crypto portfolio fell by $482m. Losses have now been recorded for a second straight quarter: in the previous reporting period the figure was $667m.

Coinbase’s revenue fell 31% year on year to $1.41bn. Transaction fees brought in $756m (-40%), while subscriptions and services generated $584m (-14%).

The exchange’s share of the global crypto market stood at 8.6%, and adjusted EBITDA declined from $930m to $303m. 

After the release, COIN shares fell 2.5% in after-hours trading to $192.

Source: Yahoo Finance. 

Analysts at Bernstein maintained a positive outlook on the shares with a $330 target. They argue the market underestimates Coinbase’s growth catalysts, including progress on the CLARITY Act. The experts noted that the “everything exchange” strategy is starting to show results.

Reducing reliance on spot trading 

Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s chief executive, said the company is shifting from a spot crypto exchange to a broader trading and infrastructure platform.

The platform plans to expand trading across multiple asset classes, including commodities, futures and event contracts on prediction markets. In March, Coinbase launched trading in regulated derivatives for Advanced platform users in 26 European countries.

“Our thesis is simple: cryptocurrency is the best form of money, and the infrastructure will rebuild the existing financial system. If it concerns money, it will concern cryptocurrency,” Armstrong said. 

He argues that building institutional revenue streams should reduce the exchange’s dependence on retail volumes, which historically track the prices of digital assets.

One growth area remains stablecoins. Revenue from this segment rose 11% to $305m. Armstrong also pointed to results from Coinbase-affiliated L2 network Base: stablecoin transaction volumes increased tenfold in the quarter. 

He also highlighted prospects for AI payments. The exchange supports the x402 protocol, which enables digital agents to settle online using USDC. 

Coinbase also participates in developing Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments — a toolkit for autonomous payments by AI assistants.

Terms of the Circle deal

On the Q1 earnings call, Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas also commented on the company’s USDC agreement with Circle.

She said the contract is automatically renewed every three years in perpetuity and cannot be terminated. 

Coinbase’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, added that the current terms of the agreement with Circle are already set and will be renewed automatically. The exchange expects to continue the partnership on the same basis.

Under the partnership, Circle is to share nearly half of USDC profits with Coinbase. That makes the stablecoin line one of the exchange’s main sources of steady income—especially as spot trading’s share declines.

Hours-long outage 

On May 7, Coinbase suffered an outage that left some users facing delays in sending and receiving assets.

At first the exchange reported “degraded performance”, later citing elevated temperatures in one AWS data centre as the cause. Trading on the platform was unavailable for six hours. The incident affected transfers on the Aleo and Solana networks. 

At the same time, Revolut experienced issues. Users received notifications showing bitcoin’s price dropping to $0.2. Pricing display errors affected charts of altcoins, including XRP and Solana. 

On May 5, Coinbase announced cuts of about 14% of its staff. Armstrong said the move was needed to optimise costs and adopt artificial intelligence more aggressively in workflows.

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