Bitcoin’s (BTC-USD) incredible upward run has brought a lot of cryptocurrency stocks up along with it. For a while, though, crypto exchange Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) looked like it might be left behind as it lost ground in Wednesday afternoon’s trading. But it rallied and came back into the green as the day’s trading was about to close. The problem is, perhaps, the stuff of every investor’s nightmares: users opened up their Coinbase accounts and discovered, much to their horror, that they had been completely wiped out.
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Indeed, Coinbase noted that “some users may see a zero balance” regardless of what they owned. Moreover, Coinbase noted that some users would see trouble with buying and selling cryptocurrency. Coinbase promised a thorough investigation and recovery as quickly as possible, noting that “your assets are safe.”
The Second-Worst Time for a Stumble
There are two terrible times for an outage in a platform like Coinbase: when cryptocurrency prices are on a rapid rise and when they’re on a rapid fall. When they’re on a rapid rise, users will complain—and with good reason—they’re missing out on gains and might consider new crypto trading platforms. In a rapid fall, meanwhile, users will complain that they could have saved their balances if they’d only been able to act sooner.
Thankfully, Coinbase has the lesser of these two problems, and the sooner it gets a fix in play, the better. Given that Coinbase only recently saw a “…LARGE surge of traffic,” the problem may be larger than expected, and Coinbase may want to start figuring out a worthwhile conciliatory gesture to make it up to their users.
Is Coinbase a Buy, Sell, or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on COIN stock based on nine Buys, eight Holds, and six Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 210.55% rally in its share price over the past year, the average COIN price target of $173.10 per share implies 13.75% downside risk.
