Coinbase Faces $140 Sell Call, OpenPayd Plans $1.1B IPO, Bitwise Takes Over USCC Fund

Crypto News

Compass Point analysts reaffirmed a bearish $140 price target on Coinbase, warning that intensifying competition in derivatives will cap the exchange's revenue growth. In a Monday note, the investment bank flagged limited pricing power as customers gain more venues for trading perpetual futures, particularly among sophisticated users. Coinbase shares slid 2.6% to around $184 by midday, reflecting investor anxiety over depressed market conditions and shrinking retail flows. The "Sell" rating underscores skepticism that derivatives can offset weakness elsewhere on the platform, even after management spent $2.9 billion last year to acquire Deribit and expand its offshore reach across regulated jurisdictions.

On Friday, Coinbase confirmed it had secured regulatory relief from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to offer offshore crypto perpetual futures to American users through its Deribit subsidiary. The clearance opens a path for the exchange to compete in a product class long dominated by non-U.S. venues, where traders hold leveraged positions indefinitely via periodic funding payments anchored to spot prices. Coinbase booked roughly $50 million in first-quarter perpetual futures revenue, though analysts caution that the line item may be cannibalizing retail spot activity on the platform rather than expanding the overall trading book in a meaningful way.

The same Friday brought a green light for prediction market Kalshi to roll out perpetual futures tied to Bitcoin, and the CME Group signaled it would move Bitcoin futures and options trading to a round-the-clock schedule. Interactive Brokers has already integrated Kalshi alongside crypto venue Bullish, while Kraken and Robinhood have telegraphed imminent perp launches of their own. The widening menu of derivatives venues mirrors a structural shift in how leveraged crypto exposure is being delivered to both retail and institutional traders, eroding the pricing power that incumbent exchanges enjoyed throughout the last cycle.

UK fintech OpenPayd announced a definitive business combination with Titan Acquisition Corp. that would list the London-based payments platform on Nasdaq at a $1.145 billion pro-forma equity valuation. Shares will trade under the ticker OP once the deal closes, with up to $276 million in gross proceeds earmarked for stablecoin and fiat orchestration buildout, regulatory licensing, and U.S. expansion. OpenPayd reported more than $85 million in annualized recurring revenue as of March 2026 and processes over $240 billion in annualized transaction volume across 1,100 business clients in 180 countries, including Kraken, eToro, OKX and B2C2. Closing is targeted for the fourth quarter.

The OpenPayd deal lands amid record activity in stablecoin payment infrastructure. Settlement volumes reached roughly $33 trillion across 2025, and the first quarter of 2026 alone moved a record $4.5 trillion through dollar-pegged tokens. Total stablecoin circulating supply has climbed near $320 billion, posting a fresh all-time high as issuers benefit from rising yields on reserve assets and growing merchant adoption. The data reinforces investor appetite for platforms bridging traditional banking rails with on-chain dollars, a thesis that has lifted valuations for payment processors integrating blockchain settlement directly into their stack.

Bitwise completed its takeover of Superstate's Crypto Carry Fund, gaining control of a tokenized investment vehicle that pursues market-neutral yield through the cash-and-carry trade between cryptocurrency futures and spot prices. The fund retained its USCC ticker and underlying smart contracts, held approximately $259 million in assets under management as of May 29, and posted around a 4% yield. The portfolio mixes cash collateral, tokenized Treasurys exposure, staked Solana, EtherFi's wrapped Ether and XRP. Data on real-world asset platforms shows tokenized active-strategy funds expanded from roughly $449 million in June 2025 to about $1.38 billion by the end of May 2026, a more than 200% gain.

Together these moves trace a single thematic arc: capital and infrastructure are migrating toward regulated, institutionally legible crypto exposure. Derivatives are being democratized across brokerages and prediction markets, payments are absorbing stablecoin rails at trillion-dollar scale, and asset managers are wrapping active trading strategies inside tokenized fund structures. The cycle's dominant story is less about speculative price discovery and more about plumbing — the rails that route dollars, leverage and yield between traditional finance and on-chain venues. As DeFi protocols absorb tokenized treasury collateral and brokerages list perps alongside equities, the boundary between crypto and capital markets continues to fade.