Public Keys: Copycat Lawsuits for Bitcoin Giant Strategy, Coinbase Hits All-Time High

Public Keys is a weekly roundup from Decrypt that tracks the key publicly traded crypto companies.

This week: Why Bitcoin treasury champion Strategy is drawing so many identical lawsuits, Coinbase hits a new peak closing price as U.S. perps near, and other keys from the week in crypto.

Strategy’s déjà vu

You may have heard that Bitcoin giant Strategy is the subject of a class action lawsuit. It accuses the company of misrepresenting the risks associated with its BTC buying plans. Then maybe you heard about the suit again, and again, and again, and again.

That’s because there are at least five different law firms that have filed copycat class action lawsuits against Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), which trades on the Nasdaq under the MSTR ticker. Two law professors who spoke with Decrypt said the identical filings are how each firm signals interest in leading the case once they’re consolidated into one single class action.

When there are multiple class action filings, it falls to the courts to choose a lead plaintiff, the professors said. That usually comes down to who’s got the most skin in the game—making large institutions like pension funds likely candidates. And once a lead plaintiff has been chosen, it’s up to them to appoint counsel.

None of the law firms that filed lawsuits responded to requests for comment from Decrypt. But the law professors spelled out the motivation pretty plainly: “The fees can be very lucrative,” University of Michigan’s Adam Pritchard said—“tens of millions of dollars and occasionally more in the biggest cases.”

An important Tolkien update: At today’s prices, Strategy’s $63.3 billion Bitcoin treasury is now worth more than the gold that Smaug, the last great dragon, had stockpiled in the Lonely Mountain.

Record high and perps for COIN

Investors eagerly watched as crypto exchange Coinbase approached and then set a new all-time high close price Thursday, when COIN was trading for $375.07. It was a huge milestone—but the company hasn’t taken its eye off the prize.

Leading up to the new high water mark, Benchmark analysts called the company “transformative” and gave it a $402 price target. And Bernstein analysts said COIN is “misunderstood,” setting an even loftier price target of $510.

This time next month, Coinbase said it will be offering U.S.-regulated perpetual-style futures for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Traders have been wanting perps for a long time. And it’s no wonder: Crypto perps have done nearly $10 billion in volume in the past day and $382 billion in the past month, according to crypto data aggregator DeFi Llama.

That’s just counting volume from DeFi protocols like Hyperliquid, Jupiter, and ApeX Protocol. Things could get a lot more interesting if Coinbase enters the chat.

Meanwhile, Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network that it incubated, has added Cardano and Litecoin to the wrapped assets it already offers on the network, including Dogecoin, XRP, and Bitcoin. This makes it easier for holders of Cardano or Litecoin to make use of Ethereum’s more robust decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, giving users the opportunity to interact with popular Ethereum-based protocols like Aave, Compound, and Curve.

Other Keys

• Next up: Bitcoin treasury company: Bakkt has never stopped reinventing itself. Earlier this year, the company sold its failing crypto custody business to its parent company for $1.5 million and hired a new co-CEO to work on a “stablecoin payments” product. Just this week, it started raising $1 billion to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet. NFT collection, next?
• Altcoin summer: Things are looking sunny for Bitwise’s Dogecoin and Aptos ETF filings, which got amended S-1 filings this week. Generally speaking, issuers update their registrations to reflect feedback from the SEC, Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas told Decrypt. “There’s been so much engagement,” he said. “It’s a completely new attitude from the SEC.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward