Coinbase CEO: "We May Be on the Cusp" of a Crypto Bull Market as CLARITY Act Vote Looms

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong told CNBC on Aug. 20 that crypto "may be on the cusp of the next bull market for crypto spot trading," a hedged view, not a confident forecast. He grounded the case in three factors: the current bear market's roughly 10-month length matches historical crypto downturn cycles, Bitcoin's historically strong Q4 seasonality (a median return of 47.7%, versus 22.5% for Ethereum), and a possible regulatory tailwind from the CLARITY Act.

That regulatory tailwind is far from settled. Armstrong said he is "pretty optimistic" the CLARITY Act clears 60 votes when it comes up in the Senate on Sept. 15, but prediction markets put the odds of passage at only about 18% as of Aug. 24, a notable gap between the CEO's public optimism and what the market is pricing in. Meanwhile COIN shares trade at a price-to-sales multiple of 8.2x, well above Simply Wall St's computed fair-value multiple of 4.6x and an industry average of 3.8x; the site's own model scores the stock 1 out of 6, screening as overvalued heading into the vote.

Separately, Coinbase has begun offering tokenized versions of four widely held US stocks, AAPL, NVDA, META, and GOOGL, on its Base blockchain. The tokens are available only to eligible investors outside the United States, issued under Abu Dhabi Global Market regulation, and custodied by Alpaca with shares held 1:1 in a bankruptcy-remote structure.

Independent asset manager Bitwise, a separate company from Coinbase with no ownership tie between the two, has built three model portfolios, Mag7X, Robotics, and AI Leaders, that use Coinbase's tokenized stocks as the underlying asset and charge a 0.15% methodology fee. A third independent platform, Glider, handles the purchases and rebalancing; the portfolios, like Coinbase's tokens, are limited to eligible non-US investors.

Together, the pieces suggest Coinbase is testing two bets at once: that Armstrong's hedged read on crypto's cycle timing plays out, and that tokenized-equity infrastructure built for non-US users can find demand before the CLARITY Act vote clarifies the regulatory picture. Given the 18% prediction-market odds and the stock's current valuation gap, the outcome of the Sept. 15 vote could matter more to Coinbase's near-term valuation than the bull-market call itself.

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