Name: Needham cuts crypto firm estimates
Uploaded: 2025-12-29T18:24:18.420Z
Duration: 3 min 57 s
Description: John Todaro, senior analyst at Needham & Company, joins ‘Money Movers’ to discuss why the firm cut estimates for crypto companies and more.

John Todaro, senior analyst at Needham & Company, joins ‘Money Movers’ to discuss why the firm cut estimates for crypto companies and more.

Needham has cut its price targets for leading crypto firms including Coinbase, Robinhood, eToro, and Gemini, while maintaining buy ratings on all. According to Needham analyst John Todaro, crypto market sentiment has reached its lowest point since October 2024, leading to reduced retail activity on trading platforms.

Todaro notes that recovery for crypto platforms may depend on trends such as real world asset tokenization, stablecoin adoption, and diversification into new markets. He highlights Robinhood's 215% year-to-date stock gain, attributing its success to a broad product offering and strategic acquisitions, with other platforms now seeking to replicate this model.

Needham cuts crypto firm estimates

Cryptocurrency is closing out a tough end to the year and Needham sees the action taking a toll on crypto exchanges in the new year. The firm slashed its price targets on Coinbase, Robinhood, eToro and Gemini, though it did maintain buy ratings on all of those stocks. Joining us now, John Todaro, he's senior analyst at Needham and Company. John, as we enter a new year, I mean, I know you have something called your crypto euphoria Needham diagram. What is it showing when it comes to sentiment? What's that mean for these stocks? Sure. It's showing that sentiment reached the lowest level recently in 2025, and it's back down to levels not seen since October 2024, which was just before the Trump election win, which which triggered a lot of positive crypto sentiment. So actually, Inauguration Day was was the peak of 2025 crypto sentiment euphoria. So we're definitely in a period of disinterest. We're actually on the border of what we're calling extreme disinterest. So it's that sentiment indication is good and bad. It's good in that all the positive sentiment has flushed out of crypto, which typically means you're starting to near a bottom in crypto prices. It's bad for the platforms, though, because that negative sentiment means there's a lot less retail activity in crypto than there was before. And it typically takes a while for retail traders to come back into the ecosystem. It could take up to two quarters or so, even with higher crypto prices for retail to really start coming back in. Is it just sort of the moves and sentiment that have you expecting it will come back or is there anything in particular you see next year that perhaps is going to aid it? It's a good question. So I think broadly what can start to help crypto platforms is actually verticals that we typically don't associate with traditional crypto tokens. And so that's real world asset tokenization. So this is actually bringing other assets on chain. Stablecoin adoption growing, which typically you don't have price changes in stablecoins. But it can benefit the crypto platforms. And then the other thing to actually benefit the crypto platforms, maybe in 26, is them diversifying away from crypto and offering prediction markets and some of these other assets. So in terms of crypto specific catalysts, I'm actually, quite frankly, struggling to come up with one in 2026. Other than those three, I mentioned that are kind of broadly and adjacently connected to crypto versus something very Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana specific at this point. I was just looking at the best performers of the market year to date. Forget NVIDIA, Robinhood, it's up 215% year to date, one of the best performing stocks of the S&P. Why is that? Is that justified? I think it has been. I mean, Robinhood has really excelled at becoming this super app. And you're now seeing all the other crypto platforms and exchanges more broadly trying to go after what Robinhood has done. And Robinhood did that not by betting on just one particular asset, but offering a ton of different products. They've done a phenomenal job of being first to market in areas and also offering a pretty in-depth product in those areas as well. They've done very well in prediction markets. Their core equities, commodities business has done well. And then also crypto has been decent. Even if you look at the crypto volumes, they've come down sector wide. But Robinhood's acquisition of Bitstamp has actually kind of blunted some of the impact to their crypto volumes. And that's because Bitstamp is a little bit more institutional. And so that volume sticks around a little bit longer versus retail. So Robinhood has done a phenomenal job in a lot of different areas. And now you're seeing Gemini, Coinbase, the others, eToro, trying to kind of catch up and become this super app like Robinhood has done so well in this year.

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