Wall Street Swept Up: How Coinbase, Gemini, and Galaxy Got Caught in the March Rout

There’s a particular kind of dread that settles over trading floors on a Friday afternoon when the numbers keep moving in the wrong direction and nobody seems to know exactly where the floor is. That was the mood on Wall Street this past Friday, and crypto markets — for all their talk of operating outside the traditional financial system — felt every bit of it.

Coinbase fell nearly 7%. Galaxy dropped about the same. Gemini slid close to 9%, one of the sharpest single-day declines in the group. It was the kind of session that reminds you how quickly sentiment can turn.

The selloff didn’t arrive out of nowhere. Since the war in Iran broke out in late February, markets have been caught in a grinding weekly cycle that feels almost predictable by now — brief relief on Monday, cautious optimism mid-week, then a slow bleed into the weekend as geopolitical nerves take over.

Investors who bought Monday’s bounce watched those gains evaporate by Thursday. By Friday, the selling wasn’t just profit-taking. It felt like something closer to genuine anxiety.

Bitcoin slipping below $66,000 was the headline trigger, but the story runs deeper than that. The cryptocurrency, which had reached an all-time high near $126,000 back in early October, has now shed roughly 45% from its peak. That’s not a correction — that’s a reckoning.

And when bitcoin moves like that, the stocks built around it don’t just follow. They amplify. Coinbase, Gemini, and Galaxy aren’t just exchanges or asset managers in the traditional sense; they’re leveraged expressions of crypto sentiment, and right now that sentiment is fragile.

Robinhood, the retail trading platform that rode the crypto wave aggressively, fell nearly 6% despite announcing an accelerated stock buyback program. That buyback announcement landing with a thud says something worth noting. In calmer markets, a company showing that kind of confidence in its own stock usually gets rewarded. On Friday, it barely registered. Investors seemed less interested in what management thought of the stock and more focused on getting out of the way.

The bitcoin balance sheet plays — Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, and the newer Twenty One Capital — also took 6% hits. Ethereum-linked treasury names like Bitmine Immersion and Sharplink Gaming weren’t spared either, sliding roughly 5%. The miners had it rough too.

Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, HIVE Digital, IREN, and Hut 8 all posted losses between 5% and 8%. Even MARA and Bitdeer, which had actually held up better than most the day before, gave back all of Thursday’s gains and then some.

It’s hard not to notice how the Federal Reserve’s paralysis is making everything worse. The central bank is caught between rising oil prices that are stoking inflation fears and a labor market that Philadelphia Fed President Anna Paulson described as carrying “new risks to both inflation and growth” because of the Iran conflict. Richmond Fed’s Tom Barkin used the word “fragile” to describe hiring conditions.

These aren’t the words you want to hear from central bankers when markets are already on edge. The 10-year Treasury yield briefly touched 4.5% before retreating. Investors who had been expecting rate cuts this year are now, quietly and reluctantly, entertaining the possibility of rate hikes.

To put the broader devastation in perspective: roughly $17 trillion in market capitalization has been erased from peak levels across the Magnificent Seven tech stocks, gold, silver, and bitcoin combined. Gold is down about 20%. Silver has dropped around 45%. The Nasdaq 100 has crossed into official correction territory, more than 10% off its January all-time high.

The S&P 500 is approaching that same threshold, currently sitting about 8.5% below its peak. The traditional 60/40 portfolio — stocks and bonds as a hedge — is offering little comfort either, with bond markets under their own pressure as global yields continue rising.

There’s a sense that crypto stocks, more than perhaps any other corner of the market, are absorbing the full force of this uncertainty. They sit at the intersection of speculative technology, monetary policy anxiety, and geopolitical risk — all three of which are firing at once right now.

Coinbase, Gemini, and Galaxy didn’t do anything particularly wrong this week. They just got caught in a moment when the market decided it didn’t want to hold anything that felt like a bet. And right now, everything in crypto feels exactly like that.

Whether the Monday relief rally returns next week is anyone’s guess. The pattern has held for weeks — green open, red close, repeat. It’s possible that some resolution around the Strait of Hormuz shifts the mood. It’s also possible the Fed says something that spooks markets further.

For now, the traders watching these crypto stocks are doing what most people do when the ground keeps shifting beneath them. They’re waiting, reducing exposure, and hoping the weekend doesn’t bring more bad news.