One of the great puzzles that employment market watchers have been wrangling with is: once artificial intelligence (AI) takes over most of the jobs, who will buy anything? Cryptocurrency exchange giant Coinbase (COIN) may have the answer to that, as it recently hosted a hackathon event called “Crypto x AI.” This might be just the thing to allow businesses to keep functioning even as they replace their employees with AI. Investors did join in, though, and sent shares up fractionally in Wednesday afternoon’s trading.
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A hackathon, for those not familiar, is basically a high-speed development session by invitation. There, people work to engineer new products and services for sponsor platforms in a very short period of time, sometimes a weekend, sometimes as little as a day. And this particular hackathon was geared toward projects that would use chatbots and mobile apps alike to run on stablecoins, essentially, digital dollars.
Several tools emerged as a result. One publishing tool was able to pay writers instantly, while another chatbot dispensed answers to questions for very small fees. But these small changes, coupled with Coinbase’s new payments protocol known as x402, represent a potential sea change in the field. That change moves us away from small coin buyers trying frantically to discover “the next Bitcoin ($BTC-USD),” and building actual tools that represent a connection between cryptocurrency and AI.
Using Politics to Fuel a Political Ban
In an interesting side note, reports note that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong actually used political speeches as an inspirational tool to ban politics at Coinbase. If that sounds bizarre, it turned out to work quite well, with Armstrong declaring that the move was one of the best things the company has ever done.
Armstrong banned political discussion from Coinbase back in 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd incident. This was a move that industry figures questioned: Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo declared the move “…the abdication of leadership.” And when 5% of Coinbase’s employees at the time took a buyout package rather than work in a politics-free zone, it might have looked like the beginning of the end. But fast forward to today, and Coinbase does seem all the better for it.
Is Coinbase a Buy, Sell or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on COIN stock based on 14 Buys, 14 Holds and two Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 46.47% rally in its share price over the past year, the average COIN price target of $367.41 per share implies 21.03% upside potential.
