What happened
Shares of Coinbase Global (COIN -9.09%) were on nothing short of a wild ride today, falling as much as 8.4% in morning trading and rising to a gain of 3.8% at its afternoon peak. Shares settled slightly lower at the end of the day and closed down 1.7%.
So what
There was some early concern that an announced integration between Coinbase Wallet and the blockchain analytics tool Etherscan was getting pushback, but that reaction seemed to have been overdone because Etherscan is a commonly used tool on Ethereum. Critics argue that this integration exposes Coinbase to unnecessary hacking risks.
Coinbase also announced today that it will pause deposits and withdrawals of Ether and ERC-20 tokens (a type of many publicly traded tokens) around the time of "The Merge". The pause will be temporary and is simply out of an abundance of caution, but Coinbase is getting out in front by announcing the move now.
Now what
Today's move is a lot of noise in a very volatile crypto market. Recent earnings from Coinbase showed that the company is suffering as any investor should expect from this crypto winter, but the company's cash balance should allow it to survive a few years at this level of activity. As for the chatter about Etherscan risks, the tool's website experienced a harmless hack in 2018 but the actual service isn't a known security risk.
If you're an investor in Coinbase, you have to believe that the future of crypto and Web3 is bright. Today's news doesn't change that thesis one bit.
