In Q2 Earnings, MSTR Surges, and Coinbase Stumbles. But What's Next? - Ep. 879
Episode publishedPodcast: UnchainedUnchained
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Hey everyone. Today's episode features a special earnings season doubleheader with two in-depth interviews conducted by Unchained executive editor Steven Ehrlich, who also writes our Bits and Bips newsletter. First, Steve speaks with Lance Vitanza of TD Cohen about Strategy's blockbuster Q2 results. The company posted a jaw dropping $10,000,000,000 in net income, But the big question is, how much of that is real, repeatable, and sustainable? Then he sits down with Owen Lau of Oppenheimer to unpack Coinbase's weaker than expected earnings. The stock dropped big after the report, but Owen argues
Good morning, everyone. I'm Steve Ehrlich, executive editor here at Unchained. I'm here with Lance Vitanza, managing director of equity research at TD Cohen and an active follower of Strategy. And we wanted to talk with you this morning to sort of digest this, blockbuster earnings report that Strategy just released. So, Lance, welcome.
Thank you for having me, Steve.
So let's just start there. What were some of the big highlights that that you saw in their q two earnings?
Well, for me, the biggest highlight is that the company has increased its full year Bitcoin yield guidance from 25 to 30%. The 30%, which is their new target, still appears conservative to me, but it represents a doubling of the introductory guidance that the company first established earlier in the year. So I think that anytime a company meets its raised guidance for the full year within seven months of the year, which is what Strategy announced yesterday, and then increases their guidance to be a double of where they started the year, I think that that has to be considered pretty strong perf
So what would you say were the main drivers behind their ability to do this? I mean, strategies Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, they're known for being aggressive in their targets anyway, they blew them out of the water halfway through the year.
Well, certainly, the the the regulatory backdrop has been very conducive for for strategy and for other public Bitcoin treasury companies or PBTCs, as I like to call them. We've had a number of favorable developments, including the FASB rules change, including just yesterday, you saw in the crypto report coming out from the from the White House that there would be basically an emphasis made to to to preserve favorable tax treatment for unrealized digital and crypto gains. So there really couldn't have been a better backdrop, and that's you've seen that in the price action of Bitcoin. Bitcoin h
Okay. So let let's talk about that. You you mentioned the new FASB guidelines, which I I think was spearheaded by Michael Saylor himself in order to let them mark their holdings to market, as opposed to just having to record losses during downturns. Dollars 10,000,000,000 in profit is massive, But I know there are some questions about how much of that outsized performance might just be because they recently started using these new guidelines. Could you maybe put their performance in historical perspective if they had the ability to go back to August 2020 and mark their holdings to market way b
There is no question that restating '24 in particular would have shown pretty dramatic gains, but not as big as the gains that we've seen so far in 2025. So through through yesterday, the company had reported over $13,000,000,000 of Bitcoin dollar gains. Now that is just represent that just represents the value of the incremental Bitcoin that they have created without issuing any additional common shares. It ignores the additional value from the fact that Bitcoin has increased drama
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