hundreds of companies, hundreds, signing a new statement that would oppose discriminatory legislation. details straight ahead it's wednesday, april 14th, 2021 "squawk box" begins right now. ♪ good morning and welcome to "squawk box" right here on cnbc, i'm andrew ross sorkin along with joe kernen and melissa lee becky is off today let's get a look at the market dow up 17 points nasdaq up 25 points s&p 500 up 3.5 points right now. treasury yields right now on the ten-year, everybody is more excited about bitcoin, but we'll show you where things stand. you're looking at 1.639 but as

joe mentioned at the top, bitcoin surging to another high, this off the back of coinbase ipo which is bringing a lot of interest to the space all over again, $63,598 at the moment let's show you the "squawk stack" for now we've got a couple of big banks set to report this morning we've got moderna. we've got more on the new efficacy numbers in just a minute and bitcoin near an all-time high i'll bet by tomorrow morning, we will have c-o-i-n in there as well for that we want to get to the top story of the morning, which is coinbase going public via direct listing the reference price coming in at $250 leslie picker joins us with more on that. >> hey, good morning, andrew a watershed moment for the crypto industry. the largest u.s. exchange for trading bitcoin and ethereum and others going public. in the meantime, the company's

so-called reference price to help guide the order flow. that price recently on private trades came in at $250 yesterday. that implies a fully diluted valuation of about $65 billion now, that's a little lower than the workplace average for coinbase in the first quarter. that implied up to about $100 billion. but still, it gives the company about the same size market cap as i.c.e., the aren't company of the nyse the coinbase is expected to have more far more volatility the s1 saying it will fluctuate due to the highly volatile nature of crypto one analyst projects 260% top line growth this year but 37% decline in 2022. however, timing is everything, and crypto momentum could be a

tailwind ahead, with bitcoin as you mentioned, andrew, reaching a record high. and it seems to be on that trend today as well. >> absolutely, leslie. thank you for that i spoke to coinbase's co-founder and ceo brian armstrong in an exclusive ahead of this listing of coinbase hitting new highs. i asked him about the impact on the listing on the broader crypto market. here's his first public comments reality in quite some time >> crypto prices, but i do think that coinbase helped the industry move forward. and helped bring the future in sooner, if it happens sooner we've done that with legitimizing crypto followed a trusted regulated approach hopefully making it even easier to use in some ways. by the way, it's not just us there's a whole industry with a

lot of amazing companies building and growing the space that's why we call it the crypto economy. it really is a new economy it has now, hundreds and thousands of companies being created in this space so, i think, you know, hopefully coinbase going public and having its direct listing is going to be viewed as kind of a landmark moment for the crypto space where, hey, this technology is here to stay it's creating a ton of value in the world. people no longer need to be scared of it like in the early days they were concerned about all of these things now, there's so many legitimate use cases. this is a regulated financial services business. i think the focus is going to be more in the future about how can we really leverage this opportunity to create more jobs, more economic growth, more economic freedom for people in every country in the world that embraces this. >> i also asked brian how investors should think spechl abou specifically to the valuation of

coinbase and how correlated they thinks they're going to be >> over the years people have asked me should i invest in coinbase or buy the underlying asset? i would tell them, first of all, why not do both, both are great ideas. i can make the case why people might want to invest in coinbase, too, it's we're not only tied to one crypto asset. we're adding assets for 100 crypto assets right now. and we're also what you might call an indexed bet or leveraged bet on the crypto space more broadly. we're selling picks and shovels. we're helping people to access this and use new technology. i think we're going to grow along with the crypto space. but if we keep growing share, then we'll sort of be an addition of that, on top of just the price of crypto, hopefully >> one of the other big questions i think investors have when it comes to valuation is whether they should care to you

a broker or an exchange. your valuation, by the way, is effectively the same as the new york stock exchange. or whether they should think of you as a fintech company, more in line with a paypal or square in terms of multiple how do you think about it? >> yeah. so, this is one of those companies where it's tough to come up with an exact comparable it's kind of like saying is tesla a car company? well, yes, but it's also kind of a software company, right? or you could item up with an example is amazon a retailer sort of. but it's also a software company. so, coinbase, it's technology, it's software, it's cyber security it also has aspects of financial services with compliance and legal and various licenses that we've gotten and so, you could say, okay, well, that's finance and technology, that's fintech i think there's some truth to that but it's actually kind of different because most fintech companies are really building,

you know, i would say kind of the ux layer on top of the same underlying rails whether that's hch transfers or swift or wire transfers or credit cards. so, a lot of their services look similar. they can innovate in the ux layer,but the price in which transactions move are similar because it's kind of underneath. we're kind of, you can think of us as the first fintech that's virtually integrated we own from the customer all the way down to the integrated rails themselves. of course, these are brand-new rails. the crypto chain currency is watching where they're inherently global, they're cross-border, they're allowing transformation times to come down they're allowing leads to come down when thinks are working well, we need to keep scaling blockchain. building on these new rails is an opportunity to create a new company, a crypto company.

it's really a new category >> last year, 96% of coinbase's revenue was generated through transaction fees i asked brian armstrong about the impact of greater competition over the long term on those fees. >> we haven't seen any margin compression yet. and i actually wouldn't expect to see it in the short or midterm. the reason is for one thing, crypto is changing so quickly and accelerating at the pace of change in terms of assets and all things that people want to do with crypto there's no real commoditization happening yet. it's a little different than the traditional brokerage world and things like that yeah, i don't expect there to be decompression short term but longer term, yes, i do think there could be decompression just like any other asset class out there so what you've seen,

in our financials, we've started to invest in different revenues streams that are starting to provide these green shoots of revenue. things like coinbase firm, coinbase debit card. or people earning yields on assets our custody business for our institutional customers, for instance these are providing more steady predictable streams of revenue my guess is in five or ten years, you'll see that it's maybe 50% or more of our revenue. >> you know, during the pandemic, coinbase became what is now known as a remote first company in this new work from heim l home hybrid what's it all look like future i asked brian what he thought about the reaction to the pandemic and how he sees the company itself evolving over the next couple of years. >> we really tried to take the setback that happened with covid, where we were all forced to be a remote company and turned it into an advantage.

so, one of the biggest things that i've been an advocate for inside of coinbase's culture is how do we get top talent in every seat one of the ways you do that is broadening the hiring funnel, right? previously, and still today, we have offices in a number of cities around the world, and what percentage of people on planet earth live within commuting distance of one of those offices? well, it's probably less than 1% just by saying we're a remote company, it helps us hire and retain great people. i don't want to claim that everything about being a remote company is easier. there are some things which are challenging. i think people still want to feel that sense of belonging and build friendships at work. there's no substitute for getting people together in person we're still doing that multiple times per year planning to go forward with that in the future with remote teams. and we're looking at novel technology solutions how we can

host offsite, in sort of a 3d virtual environment. there are cool products on the scene that help create those moments of spontaneity in person >> you can watch a lot more of this interview throughout the program with coinbase's ceo brian armstrong. the first time he's speaking out and the only time he's speaking out ahead of this listing today. we even talk about peter thiel's response with bitcoin. getting into so many issues, joe and melissa, that we debate here on the program in terms of regulation in the united states, in terms of nfts, the whole gamut, a lot to look out for >> hefty commission. they're hefty. melissa, i harken back to when i first sort of became a believer, but then didn't really know how

to -- if you wanted to do something with it, you needed to act on it. i asked brian kelly about it, and i watched some video which you can look up on google about a private wallet in setting something like that up >> right you can do that. >> i'm telling you, i was so overcome with just abject fear of the whole process that coinbase would have been the only way the only way it makes it so much easier otherwise, they talk about getting a notebook and write everything down, put it in a sage if you lose it, you're dead forever. it's complex to try to do the private. >> right >> but then again, there are concerns you wouldn't want to have -- obviously, i wouldn't be able to do it -- but if you have $10 million worth of bitcoin, you need a private wallet. that's not a good idea to have that sitting on coin >> right >> but as we advance and gets more capitalized and everything that's happening now and that's

happened in the last couple years, i guess you could feel better about that. brian even told me, melissa, he's got it somewhere where the entire internet could go down. >> right >> and he's still got the bitcoin. >> right you have to prepare for that armageddon day when you don't have electronic access to the key. you need to have all of those digits written down on hard paper. but, joe, i think you raised the question that gets to the idea of decompression, and what happens to coinbase at that point in time when decompression goes down and the other part of their business may not have expanded to the extent that investors have anticipated maybe there's a rival private wallet that makes the whole thing more frictionless and takes away from that business. how fast can they get to f ft. nfts, i spoke to a board member on "fast money" in terms of things they offer to trade. that's a big thing when you take

a look at valuation. >> and they're getting into custody. we talked at one point about dan lobe, for example, third point is using coinbase for custody. >> sure. the question is do wall street firms effectively try to ape what coinbase is doing and get into that business as well it appears that coinbase is so far ahead of everybody else that we'll see. >> or, you can think of the example with robinhood a startup that came along and changed the way wall street offered trading and how wall street interacted with customers. >> you won't get 2.5% in, 2.5% out fees forever. believe me, compared to what it would entail, not to use coin bain up 2.5%, that's fine. it reminded me of the old days when you owned gold that you may need it which is never going to

happen until the end of the pandemic, it's not happening but you have to get out of the country, you got to bribe the border guards or something all of the crazy scenarios if you go there with your gold etf, you say, i swear, i have this gold, can i get out you would need the maple leafs or something that's what i feel about having it on paper, but really coinbase has the bitcoin, does it not >> yeah it does. >> so, there's got to be an easier way to actually get physical possession of a digital asset. it's all -- i kn just enough to be dangerous. i believe in the underlying principle, but i'm no brian kelly. and i will willingly admit that. could you do it? melis melissa, could you andrew >> if i can to

>> a private wall jet. >> wallet? >> it's doable totally doable but just scary. >> i don't think i could maybe you guys could >> anyway, great interview >> yes >> thanks. we've got a lot more of that coming up, you can really see sort of how he thinks about the world. >> i can't wait to look at my twitter account now. people will be loaughing at me. coming up, the ceo of moderna going to join us on the new efficacy numbers six months after the dot and how it does. and also the pause of the j&j vaccine, huge story. plus reddit co-founder alexes ohanian and the listing and first, the big bank reports, net interest in income, before the opening bell "squawk box" will be right back. ♪

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welcome back on today's "squawk planner" we are kicking off -- we're not, but earnings season, no matter what we do, it is kicking off today. we can't stop it

three big bank reports, jpmorgan expected, goldman sachs in the 7:00 hour and wells fargo at 8:00 eastern we'll hear from bed bath and beyond, i'm told they still don't carry beds at the company, if you're planning on going there to buy a bed, that's false advertising. they do not sell them. go somewhere else. on the data front, margin import and export prices, and fed speak. jay powell, the vice chairs of dallas and new york all have events today gives you chills, doesn't it >> yeah, it does news out yesterday after the closing bell, moderna said its vaccine is more than 90% protecting against co-individual and 95% effective against severe disease, six months after the second dose. the updated data comes from

moderna's phase 3 trial. it brings moderna one step closer to full approval. once it gets approval it can start marketing directly to supers moderna's ceo stephane barsle will join us meantime, more on "squawk box," hundreds of companies jumping into the controversial voting rights, we'll see who signed the statement check out class "a" and class "c" shares of discovery, sinking. credit suisse is still unraveling its positions from the belowup of archegos capital report and the shocking classes of discovery yet yesterday, that stock ran up at the beginning of the year as archegos took a very large position in the company.

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welcome back to "squawk box," new this morning, powerful message, hundreds of companies, executives from around the country signing on to anew statement opposing discriminatory legislation that would make it harder for people to vote. the new signatories including some of the largest companies in america, amazon, blackrock, google, warren buffett signing that letter personally, general

motors, the list goes on and on and on a new statement was organized in recent days by former american express ceo ken chenault that helped a letter opposing legislation. came on the air last month ken frazier also helped organize the statement. the statement, we should say, doesn't address specific legislation in the states. among the notable companies that declined to sign the statement, this is where things get interesting, coca-cola, with the remarkable blowback they've received from this, mitch mcconnell has come out quite publicly against companies on this as well jpmorgan was not a signer in this regard. nike, not a signer there's a number of companies that do business in china, for example, that were concerned about being described as, quote, hypocrites if they took this position here in the united states and elsewhere i have to say, if you really

look at this, this is not 72 black americans -- you know, black business leaders who are coming out saying this as they did two weeks ago. this is now some of the largest companies in america that are concerned about what's happening. and now 47 different states that have a number of different proposals on the table relating to voting laws ostensibly meant to protect the vote and make the vote more secure but in many instances, i think it's impossible to suggest that in some cases they suppress the vote for one particular party. i should say that all of these things, all of these voting proposals have been put up by the republican party i know that both of the kens, and i believe all of these companies would say this is not a partisan issue this is an issue about democracy. about making sure we don't have a corrupt democracy. and the profit unto itself is

not corruptive but it's fascinating to see so many companies decide to stand up and to speak out specifically on this issue. and their concern really about what they say, and i should say this, what they say is the big lie. and i don't want to make this political. but i think there's a real concern that a lot of these laws have been drawn up in part because of the view that has been established over and over again that the last election was somehow not secure and that leaving that history, or by creating new laws, it almost imbeds that as the accurate history which, of course, we know now it is not. >> right it is interesting, though, in this culture now corporate culture of having to take a stand on social issues to see which companies are willing to go ahead and sign that statement. and which companies did step back they spoke out against it. but you sell coca-colas to democrats and republicans. there can be blowback as you mentioned in terms as being

viewed as a hypocrite, especially with china as a hypocrite in terms of human rights and civil rights legislation. this is a very thorny line to toe for corporate america. it's interesting to see who signed, who didn't whose still speaking out and is that going to be enough in this environment. >> well, it's interesting to see the change this is dynamic whether you look at states like indiana, michigan, other places you're seeing the laws i'm not sure i'm not sure how much the changes begins >> andrew, this in particular is a pretty generic statement almost anyone would sign anything that discriminates or suppresses votes, the vote, you would not want to pass anything like that. but then you're going to get into the issue of whether asking for identification suppresses the vote and de facto probably does, i guess. there's a lot -- in georgia alone, there's 200,000 black

americans that don't have a driver's license would get get the state-owned i.d. or state-issued i.d. how many would it does raise a lot of questions that not giving enough credit to people that they would get a state i.d. >> right >> i'm sure you could eventually do that. i mean, it is a weird point that we're at, andrew, where people are talking about mandatory vaccines but you can't ask for an i.d. to vote. it's hard to square -- >> i think -- i would just make one distinction here which is i think -- and i've spent a lot of time on the telephone with both ken chenault and ken frazier, i feel like saturday, i've been on the phone, so many of them trying to understand their particular view. many of them believe there are elements of these laws that are helpful. and i think the i.d. element of it unto itself is not something that in every case they're

objecting to at all. >> right >> in the state of texas, part of the issue, for example, is a college i.d. doesn't count >> right >> and there are things -- there are just issues around, as we've talked about, you know, how many absentee ballot locations are there. >> right >> when can you get access to them can working people get access to them when they closing at 5:00 p.m. of course, they can. especially in the innercity. if you go from having 40 to eight in particular locations, by default, that's making it harder to vote >> right >> and for political purposes. >> you'd need to look at each one individually and i don't think that's being done. >> right >> how many did you say there were, 47 >> well, no, in georgia, for example -- >> no how many new -- how many different states are considering it >> oh, right now, something on the order of 47 different states and you have to go state by state. >> each one, right

>> but i think what you're going to do is see companies do that one very famous ceo who we've been on the show with a million times says to me, he says, look, the craziest part about this situation is if you had a manager inside your company who was running around saying that the ceo or whomever didn't deserve to have the job and got the job through, you know, through all the wrong reasons and was lying about it, you would fire that person instead, what we're doing is we're creating laws that effectively -- effectively enshrine that as truth and i think that was actually fascinating just because he put it in sort of a management context in a business the way he runs it. and also, i think there's a view that, you know, when we're talking about china, but it's the ideas that we're going to export a democracy if the idea is that our democracy matters more than anything else, that's what should be a shiny beacon to the

rest of the world, it's actually important that companies speak up and say and make sure it is >> you also want to guarantee one person gets one vote and that's what works. >> absolutely. >> whether there was a narrative that it is a big lie and it didn't really happen you still want to make sure one person gets one vote because if there was any type of, you know, fraudulent voting - and that's democracy >> it disenfranchises -- >> 100%. except there wasn't evidence that there was >> or a massive amount that would have changed the election. no one is saying that there's zero and to try to just compare signatures is -- i mean, it's a sticky, thorny issue it's weird -- andrew, debt that and coke, initially, they said, we've worked with the georgia legislature and we've made this a better loft. then as a result of pushback,

they said, okay, we condemn it completely then there's pushback again. and now they didn't sign letter, so, now -- what it michael jordan say republicans buy sneakers, too. >> i don't think that's what this is about. i think it indicates there was a blowback, there's a view of we put our statement, why do we need to say it again >> why wouldn't they sign this -- i would sign anything that's zdiscriminatory in terms of voting, obviously, it's so generic that anyone would sign it >> right the one thing i would suggest to you, if these laws were what they say they are, i think we'd all agree you could come up with ways to secure the vote and make -- and actually expand voting you could say we're going to have more drop boxes but we're going to have security at those drop boxes we're going to open them 24 hours a day. >> right >> we're going to work with people to get i.d. cards -- if really i.d. cards is something

that people wanted you would say we're going to spend millions of dollars to actually create campaigns. there are things you could do. but that is not what's happening in these instances >> right a lot of people are discussing this topic not really out in the open a lot either, andrew >> yeah. >> politicized coming up, earnings season kicks off in the next few minutes. we'll hear from jpmorgan, goldman sachs and wells fargo all before the opening bell. "squawk box" will be right back. hey lily, i need a new wireless plan for my business, but all my employees need something different. oh, we can help with that. okay, imagine this... your mover, rob, he's on the scene and needs a plan with a mobile hotspot. we cut to downtown, your sales rep lisa has to send some files, asap! so basically i can pick the right plan for each employee... yeah i should've just led with that... with at&t business...

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welcome back to "squawk" this morning perhaps picking up on the last conversation we're having. new just out, just capital watching a multiyear tracker to hold companies agent on racial equity taking a look at the first 100 in the russell 1000. 18 companies ranging from amazon, apple, citi bank and starbucks. joining us is the managing

director of engagement at just capital. interesting we just had a conversation on voting rights. so much is intertwined with what's happening with the way investors are looking at companies. esg, and it's something that just capital is doing, trying to index and trying to create metrics around this. what did you find? >> so, i'll start with this, our mission at just capital to build a more just economy that works for all americans. and the american public, the majority of them believe that corporations play a defining role in shaping our nation everything you were talking about from protecting and upholding democracy, to creating a more just form of capitalism about 70% of americans believe that it's important that corporate leaders take a stand on important social issues so, what we've done is we've created a tracker that really shows how the 100 largest companies are following through on their diversity and equity commitments. >> and that's their diversity and commitment, we should say,

internally, in terms of numbers inside the company, what they say publicly, or is this about speaking out, in fact, on some of these issues? how do you define that >> so, what we're doing is we're looking across six different domains, equity data, racial and ethnic diversity data, community investments, response to mass incarceration. we're looking across those six different dimensions that are a lot of workplace issues and community-related issues >> can i ask you a question, you know, we have -- there are two schools of thought on this we hear from a lot of viewers. we have some viewers that say this stuff is great. and sigh care about these issues and i'm looking at the data. and then i get viewers that say, sorkin, what are you doing just tell us about the economics of these companies this date did is not relevant to my decision to make an investment today what are you finding? >> well, i don't think that

that's necessarily true. we know that 14 of the largest institutional investors are calling on companies to disclose demographicic data what we've seen by assessing the 100 largest american companies is they're really good at disclosing what we call baseline dei policies, things like harassment or equal employment opportunity. but they're not great at showing actions that show accountability towards progress things like equity data and things like diversity target what we're doing we're calling on companies to be transparent in the scale way that institutional investors are asking for this information. >> so, we're going to see, i think there's a big debate, we're at proxy, and there's a number of big campaigns going on in america over these issues in most cases, i don't know if this is surprising or not, the companies are usually pushing back they're usually telling their investor base to vote against

proposals that require more disclosure and at the same time, this goes against davevy jones saying yes, we care about this issue, but, no, we don't want to disclose the data is just joining any of these campaigns for more disclosure? >> so, yeah, part of our work is incentivizing companies to be transparent on this data we understand it's important that workers, customers, investors have access to information so they can help to make investment decisions on things like his. we've seen that companies who disclose more workforce demographic data outperform in the markets versus those who don't. so this data is very important we know this proxy season issues of diversity and inclusion are going to be two things on the ballot >> we appreciate you joining us. folks, check out the site. it's tritt interesting stuff

melissa i'm going to send it over to you. i should mention to you, even though we had that big conversation about voting, melissa, on which companies are speaking out about political issues, i've got brian armstrong, a clip of that just in a little bit. he has a firm stance against speaking out, put out a very controversial memo last year about it >> that's right. >> we'll get into some of the details of that. >> that is called a tease. coming up, the china crackdown continues. ergh morovnit,aj companies pledge to fall in line with anti-monopoly rules. we've got the details, next. keeping your oysters business growing has you swamped. you need to hire. i need indeed indeed you do. the moment you sponsor a job on indeed you get a shortlist of quality candidates from a resume data base claim your seventy-five-dollar credit when you post your first job at indeed.com/promo

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chinese tech stocks jumped overnight in hong kong trading china's market regulator met with 34 chinese internet platforms yesterday. and warned them to learn from the crackdown on alibaba and submit a plan for compliance in a statement the regulators says, that the major tech companies outpledged to comply with anti-monopoly rules. over the weekend, regulators fined alibaba $2.8 billion as you recall for stifling competition in online retail then met with affiliate ant on monday and ordered to restructure as a financial holding company. so, melissa, you're working on jpmorgan hey, sorkin, did you see harvey gallup yesterday in the op-ed in the journal, have you read that

yet? >> i did not i apologize, i'll look at it right now. >> yeah, check it out. >> i'm behind. >> he was the predecessor to ken chenault, he basically said bad idea >> politics risky business for ceos >> four reasons. he agrees with the premise >> right, right. >> he's not saying he disagrees with what they're trying to effect >> you guys want to hear about the enormous fee >> yeah, we do. >> it's up on the screen >> a lot of fish to fry here >> this is a big one, jpmorgan revenue of $3.2 billion beats estimates of $4.5 billion. comparable to the estimate of 310. looks like a blowout for shares of jpmorgan, valued on the richest valuation on the price to book ratio compared to all the big banks. widely regarded as best of three, joe we'll see how the stocks react

to this. >> not reacting very well so far. >> we'll dig into the numbers, too. >> that's why i was giving you some time. i saw the 450 and the stock down >> we just want to bring the headline as much as we know, then we'll continue. >> for more on jpmorgan results let's bring in stephanie link, chief investment strategist at hightower and a cnbc contributor. in seeing the flashes, stephanie, the stock has had a good run and anything that would have been surprising in terms of disappointing investors. 1% -- it could be up 1% next time we check on it. i'm not saying it's necessarily something in the results but what did you make of it? >> good morning, joe first and foremost, let's just put everything into context, for the banks in general, a couple things that we're all expecting. really big large reserve releases my suspicion is that's how they actually beat the number on the

jpmorgan side. in general for the banks expecting almost 6 billion in reserve releases that's a 15% help to earnings, right? at the same time, you'll see slow net interest come depressed. we'll see that recover into 2021 and 2022 it will still be depressed fees are going to be terrific. capital markets, rather, and corporate banks, pipe lines, mortgage refiswill be strong interest before you set aside bad debts will go good you will see good beats because of the reserve releases. i think it's all about guidance. you're right, the stock could be up 1 or down 1 it's up 62% in the past year guess what, this thing is trending really richly, 1.9 times book the expectations are high. some more color here in terms of what is comparable. we did want to make sure

3.31 is comparable to 3.10 still a beat on the eps. smaller than what the headline number implied $5.2 billion in net reserve releases to your point in order to get to that number, this could play a role and that would throw into question the quality of this earnings beat. what do you think? >> yeah,you know that's exactly right no one pays for reserve releases, but it means you have excess capital it means you can buy back a heck of a lot more stock, right they are going to increase their dividend when they can at the end of june. it's like not a bad thing to have reserve releases but we just don't pay for it. then again, we are going to see the big beats. it will lead to eventually more capital allocation that's at the end of the day one of the positives for the things. you are getting a pretty good valuation. you're getting good valuations on banks you get 5x as well as dividend

increases. clearly as rates go higher, that's positive for the banks. >> do you own j.p. >> i don't i own a bunch of other ones. i own morgan stanley, i ones own wells fargo later this morning, i own american express and bank of america the rate call if you want higher exposure to rates, bank of america is the biggest exposure. morgan stanley i like the m&a strategy that gorman has put into place they are diversifying their revenue stream they are less dependent on a yield turn wells fargo is a turn around story. i expect that quarter to be pretty ugly but i want to hear about progress on the turn around. >> we're going to ask you about it, too. you're going to stick around. >> you are yes. >> wells fargo coming up later melissa was up at 3:41 she tweeted that out just to let

everyone know that she was up. >> things i do for you, joe. you asked me to be here. the things i do for you. >> i didn't ask. i begged. >> you begged. >> what a sight to see that was worth it. that was worth waking up at 3:41 this morning >> what about tomorrow i begged you for tomorrow. >> can you beg right now >> grovel, snifvel. >> come on. >> oh, double beg. i'll be here. >> andrew, pitch in. it's your shoe too i'm on your knees. you can't see where my knees are but i'm on my knees. >> i was going to deny it that i begged but wait a minute there's a video. i said it on air it's going to be hard for me to deny that. still ahead, the ceo of moderna is going to join us for the new efficacy numbers on the vaccine and the pause in the j&j vaccine. plus we have investor mike novogratz. good day to have him

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shares of stitch fix under pressure this morning. katrina lake will become executive chair. elizabeth spaulding will succeed her on the 1st moderna joins us with a first on cnbc interview with the updated efficacy numbers "squawk box" will be right back.

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jpmorgan the first stock to report it's down 1.9% the numbers and market reaction straight ahead as the second hour of "squawk box" begins right now.

good morning welcome back to "squawk box" right here on cnbc i'm andrew ross sorkin in with joe kernen and melissa lee becky is off today u.s. equity futures we'll show you quick at this hour -- well, interesting, jpmorgan numbers talk about in a second dow off 20 points. nasdaq looking to open 26 points higher s&p 500 looking to open 1.5 points higher. i'll send it over to melissa with the jpm news. >> this crossed moments ago. here's a low down. first of the big banks set to report here. eps it did beat on an x items basis. it came in ahead of expectations both the top and bottom lines. earnings per share were not 450. the estimate was 310 it did beat. revenue for the quarter at $33.13 billion versus $30.5

billion. the stock has been pretty volatile on the back of that release. reading into some of the details of it. net reserve release of $5.2 billion which of course is not recurring did help them beat those estimates. there is some initial knee-jerk reaction down 1.7% the stock looks pretty stable. down 1.1%. we'll keep watching this as the morning goes on. goldman sachs expected with the numbers and market reaction straight ahead. we'll get quickly to moderna, but just one point to make, guys that is, we talk about the 10-year being kind of quiet today. >> yeah. >> it's always quiet because it's only 5 basis points, but it makes a difference so i thought it was interesting we had that hot inflation number and we actually dropped from 1.68, 1.69 down to 1.63. that's because of the six people that got blood clots

>> yeah. there was a reason for safety, for sure. >> that's what prompted it that suddenly where the reopening maybe gets pushed back a little or there's a perception of that, and suddenly the -- you know, i think the 10-year was a feature today because it has been quiet been at about 1.6% or 1.65 for six weeks or so. okay let's get to this next story because it concerns the vaccines moderna says the vaccine is more than 90% effective in protecting against covid, even more effective after a second dose meg tirrell joins us now with a very special guest i guess, meg, you know what, we're going to want to know every six months about lasting immunity and antibody response to these vaccines. we're going to have to it's going to be our life from now on >> right this is a brand-new virus so every six months gives us new information about how long these brand-new vaccines will last

stefan bancel joins us now he has that information. the big news of this week, what joe was just talking about the j&j vaccine and the safety concerns around those six reports of these serious but rare blood clots you looked into your data. your vaccine's been given to millions of people do you see any similar risks of blood clots or any kind of safety event with your vaccine as of now? >> good morning, meg indeed, we are following very closely the safety, as we should, and i of course am in dialogue with the cdc and ff da. indeed we put a statement out yesterday that we looked at the data of 64.5 million doses that have been administered to people around the world and we have not seen any data suggesting any association with blood clots or thrombotic events. >> what is your interpretation of sort of the fda's move here there was a lot of criticism that this would lead to vaccine hesitancy. a lot of messaging that also

because we had not seen this with the mrna vaccines, people will be encouraged to get those as this gets worked out with the j&j vaccine. are you concerned about hesitancy about vaccines as a result of this situation >> actually, i believe quite the opposite if you think about it, this is yet another proof to the american people that we have the best regulatory agency in the world and the scientific and medical safety of the product and they will take any signals like we saw last fall, if you remember some companies had pause on the medical trials because the fda wanted to proceed safely you're seeing the same thing the fda will not hesitate to be very cautious to analyze the data to take the time required to do so, protect the safety of the american people. >> this, of course, puts more pressure on moderna and pfizer here in the united states to

deliver vaccine doses and perhaps around the world as well you know, this might just last a few days for johnson & johnson and it might be back up and contributing to supply, but as of now how does your manufacturing look are you confident you can hit all of your targets here in the u.s. and are you looking at the same goals around the world is there any way of increasing output here this year? >> yeah, so, as you know, we had a goal of 100 million doses in the first quarter. we finished that two days before the end of the quarter which was an amazing effort by our teams and our partners just to put it into perspective, in 2019 we made less than 100,000 doses for a full year. so you can imagine the type of ramp up that the team had to do, and that confirmed that we are on track to deliver the second tranche of 100 million doses to the u.s. government by the end of may and on track for the third one by the end of july if you look at the data which,

you know, i happen to do every morning on the cdc website for vaccinations, it's very heartwarming to see that we are around 80% of others of 65 years of age around the country that already have one dose. i think we're getting to a point. as you know, most states have vaccinations we're getting to a phase that i believe in the next 30 days ish i believe this country is going from not having enough vaccines to having potentially too many vaccines. >> stefan, when we look at the efficacy, we can't help but think both as individuals and as populations. so 90% is such a great number, but as an individual you would think, wow, i have a one in ten chance even though i've gotten the moderna vaccine. i've got a one in ten chance of getting covid. that might be what you draw from that conclusion.

but in reality, if you had 90% of the population that had that type of efficiency, there is a number where the virus just sort of burns out, and i'm sure it's much lower than 90 i'm not asking you to be an epidemiologist, but what is that number because six months from now we may not be 90, we may be 80. six months from them we may be 60, we may be 70 can't you keep this virus under control even at 50%? >> so i think it's a bit too early to know, joe, what is req required what i think this really shows is what we've been saying for now months, is that we believe we need the boosting moderna has been very active in its boosting strategy. we need to pick the best strategy we're testing now.

boosting our currently authorized vaccine we're going to boost all of the neutralizing antibodies. we have a new program called mrna 1273.351 which is 100% of the full spike protein of the virus variant in south africa and we're also testing a combo of those two, 50/50 mass ratio to the 1273.351. we put out a paper showing those boosting strategies with variant vaccines show very high neutralizing antibodies. we are fully confident we will get the data in humans, we should see the same thing. >> which is part of the promise of this very agile technology, the messenger rna technology you could boost normal immunity to normal covid and combine it with some sequences in the

booster and do that fairly quickly and regular? >> correct the regulators are given guidelines we are doing this directly so i think it's going to be a few months to get in that data ready to go to the regulators. our goal is to get it ready before the fall. i want to make sure there are boost vaccines available in the fall so that we protect people as we go into the next fall in the u.s. >> stefan, a lot has happened in the last 24 hours which has led investors to rethink how they value your stock yesterday's boost was a $4 billion add. can you walk investors through how you think about, first of all, the move closer to full approval which would allow you to sell the vaccine directly to private companies but then also

the notion that johnson & johnson and astrazeneca, the pressure is largely abated so, therefore, the pricing pressure on your vaccine and pfizer's vaccine pretty much goes away or is eased how should we think about these two items of news and how they impact your forecasts? >> yes, that's a great question. i mean, as you know, we are now 15, 16 months chasing this virus and if you look at how the different technologies are carried out, you know, the protein vaccines are not approved yet the antiviral vaccines are lower and potentially this is some rare safety issues and more manufacturing as you know, one of the great compliments of mrna is we do not need sales to make the product it's making it with enzymes, much more scaleable. if you look at the amount of

companies on the market, they have been able to deliver. whereas, if you look at companies across the globe, there have been more technologies i think as the race against the virus continues and accelerates, the variants are going to be in a tough space. i personally worry deeply about the next six months. it's mofk into the fall and winter, we will see a lot in the south. you are seeing spikes around the world. many of those people are not vaccinated and many are immunocompromised. i'm not surprised to see rises in brazil, south africa, india i think it's a race against the virus. we have increased the manufacturing capacity we announced a few weeks ago, and assuming the variant strategy holds at the 16 microgram dose, we are up to 2.8 billion doses

for boosting in 2022 so i think that as the race against the virus continues and we need to keep a very strong base, i think there's no technology better positioned talking about efficacy, safety, manufacturing stability. >> stefan, i have a follow-up question to that in terms of how we think about sales though. >> go ahead, meg >> these crosscurrents i'll continue with my question in terms of -- she apparently is having some technical difficulties so i'll follow up on the question. should investors increase what they think about sales given what you said about the next six months potentially but also based on your time line for now for full approval for the vaccine as well as the idea that pricing pressure has largely gone away? one of the worries of the bayer case for moderna >> yeah.

i think most people the piece for me is the boost. so many have not believed we're going to be selling boost next year and in '23 and '24. this virus, as i've said before, and many variants is not going away we have to live with it. we will get -- i anticipate that in the next year or so we're going to see a lot of variants as more and more people get vaccinated or naturally infected, the place of the virus will slow down or stabilize like the flu. with moderna, you'll get the flu vaccine this year and then combine a flu vaccine to a covid vaccine so you only have to get one boost at your local cvs store that will protect you with a variant of concern against covid. as with the flu vaccine, we can get to a high strain

they have 60% efficacy in good years. in bad years is 40%. that's why many people don't take the flu shots we believe we should be able to get high efficacy flu vaccines combined with the covid variant. high efficacy. you can take one dose and have a better chance. >> it's meg tirrell. you are laying out your research and development across from rsv, cmv, hiv and flu as you just mentioned. do you expect mrna to work so well in all of these other viruses? you've set a pretty high bar in covid in your first horse out of the barn here. >> so we believe so, meg i think there are three reasons. one is the fidelity of the biology. we have the virus protein in the human cell not like protein in the e. coli.

we're making this in a human cell in your own body. it's totally mimicking the natural infection without getting the virus. number two on efficacy, we can make very complex protein. as you know, meg, for cmv vaccine, we have six mrna in the dose and five of those have to come together and form a very complex protein that is very hard if not impossible to do with recombinant it is making your cells like if you have the natural cmv infection. you can combine things so if the right biology is free for 5 antigen, we can do that. we can ensure high efficacy. do i believe most of those vaccine have a high chance to get high efficacy to the market? i do believe so. >> stefan bancel, it will be quite the story to watch we appreciate you being with us

this morning. >> thank you >> thanks for that, meg. coming up, coin base ready to go public we'll hear from the co-founder in an exclusive interview. before we head to break, take a look at futures at this hour we're seeing the dow trade lower by 40 points "squk x"ilbeig bk.awbo wl rhtac

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$65 billion is the same market cap as the new york stock exc exchange i spoke to coin base founder in an exclusive interview and i asked him what he thought about

peter thiel's comments and he said even though he's a bitcoin maximalist he wonders if bitcoin can be thought of in part as a chinese financial weapon against the u.s. here's what brian had to say. >> when i saw it, what i assumed he meant is i think actually a good point which is that china has really embraced cryptocurrency and blockchain in a big way starting from about 6 years ago or so, they made it one of their primary initiatives. china has a central bank digital currency that is live out there in china people are using it. they're substantially far ahead and i think this is an important point that many in the u.s. government have not fully internalized the u.s. government should also have a central bank digital currency based on the dollar and i believe other countries around the world should as well every major country is going to have a central bank digital currency in the near future is my prediction.

>> when it comes to treasury secretary janet yellen who has been very critical of crypto, i asked brian if he thinks they understand the crypto world. >> in general, crypto's a very new space and people are working to get up to speed on it in every way. one of the big things that's not known well out there today, there are still some folks in the mind set of hey this must be mostly used for illicit transactions i always kind of cringe a little bit when i see that. frankly, it doesn't match the data underneath. if you look at the third party blockchain analytics firms, there was a report kind of published today by the crypto council for innovation that looked at this, you know, our best estimates are less than 1% are used for crypto transactions certainly with cash, pwc says it's 4% for illicit

transactions in the broader economy it could be from to 4%. the data we have indicates crypto is not uniquely crime ridden the data suggests it's better than cash in that regard so these are the kinds of conversations that we need to increasingly have with our partners in government i think we want to be a helpful resource to, you know, talk to them about this new emerging technology and what are the opportunities it's going to create that's honestly -- it's far more interesting to look at the opportunities while also being thoughtful about mitigating any risks. >> in terms though of risks, real risks, even existential risks to the business, where does regulation lie to you in terms of how regulators think about cryptocurrency >> yeah. so i think it's one of the biggest ones it's right up there with cyber security it's a couple of the biggest ones that i think about. especially now that coin base is a public company we're going to increasingly be

having scrutiny and people want to understand the stipulations since the start of the company with everybody in d.c. and really lawmakers, policy folks around the world because of course coin base is in many different countries now about how we can most thoughtfully build this industry and this company. as i mentioned earlier, this is a regulated financial services business today and we're very excited and happy to play by the rules. basically we ask, hey, we want to be treated on a level playing field with traditional financial services at the very least and not have any kind of punishment for being in the crypto space. >> we also discussed another regulatory risk for crypto which is the governments may very well want to maintain control over their own currency it's a big question whether it could ultimately hamper the growth of crypto. >> a lot of central banks around the world by the way are looking

at creating central bank digital currencies we're supportive of those efforts and we're happy to help governments who want those as well i'll make an analogy back to the internet i think when the internet first came out a lot of governments were nervous about it. they were sort of asking, hey, does this kind of prevent us from having control over how communication happens. some countries, china created the great firewall of china and tried to clamp down on it. they have strict currency controls most places in the free world they've embraced the free internet after trepidation and it turned out to be a huge advantage for the country for all of the companies that got created there. some of the largest companies in the world. i think the same is going to happen with cryptocurrency you could make an analogy. we have paper mail and also have email. some people when email came out, email is going to replace paper mail that didn't turn out to be the

case there's more paper mail sent today than years ago the cryptocurrency is going to be seen as a complementary thing to the traditional economy governments that embrace it are going to stand to benefit from it enormously along with all of their citizens >> and interestingly, more institutions are now buying into cryptocurrencies, both large companies like tesla and dan loeb's third point i asked him what kind of competition he's expecting from wall street. >> we're storing over $200 billion of crypto which is about 11% of all of the crypto in the world. half of that is from our institutional customers. also roughly about half of our trading volume is from our institutional customers. this business is a lot newer for us than our retail business. the institutional business is only about 2 years old and we're

still earlier in our process of monetizing that customer segment. you know, just kind of zooming out from a macro point of view, i think majority of money in the world is actually tied up in institutions i think it's maybe 80 or 90% we expect that business to be really big over time having that kind of foundation of a trusted and compliant platform is essential to that. just to the last part of the question, how do we expect other firms out there in wall street or otherwise to respond, what's great is that many of them are now getting into crypto, which is what we had always hoped. we want crypto to be integrated into every aspect of the financial situation. some will build solutions in house. we may have opportunities to power underlying solutions whether it's customer or trading for other solutions as well. it is a hard technology problem. how do you integrate with block chains how do you store cryptocurrencies securely. it's a very different problem

than saying using the dtcc to store securities that gives you a little bit of a picture about how the institutional space might evolve over time. >> and when you think though about the institutional space and, frankly, even the retail space, a lot of people are trying to get exsure to crypto, how far are we away -- maybe it's the question that everyone wants to know is, you know, when there will be etfs, when there will be other instruments that people can use to get access and does that help you or does that hurt you when that happens >> i think it helps us i mean, again, we want crypto to be integrated into every aspect of the financial system. etfs are things that a lot of great people have been working on for a while there's a bit about the market structure in the crypto space that still needs to evolve to get to a place where the etf would approve that a lot of the work is happening behind the scenes and i would expect that to happen over time. if we can make it easier through

index funds -- or etfs to get more people into crypto, that would be a great outcome from our point of view. >> we'll have a lot more with that exclusive interview with brian armstrong including why he chose the direct listing route for its public debut, but i don't know if you caught it. the idea that he hinted there that he may ultimately try to power some of the crypto entities that the big wall street banks are going to be trying to do i thought was pretty interesting and maybe a new avenue for them. melissa? >> sure could be we are watching shares of goldman sachs. they are rising premarket on the back of the earnings release now up by 1% it was a beat on the top and bottom lines 18.60 in eps versus 10.22. $17.7 billion versus $12.6 billion. really stunning when you think about the rise in revenue year on year. it was more than a double year on year. one line item that stood out to me at least was investment banking revenues which came in

well ahead of what wall street was expecting and we all knew that it was going to be a very, very strong quarter when it came to investment banking given the spac pipeline, et cetera but it exceeded by $3 billion. we'll continue to dig through the numbers and get some more maeteark rction to gs's numbers when "squawk box" comes right back flexshares are carefully constructed. to go beyond ordinary etfs. and strengthen client confidence in you. before investing consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. go to flexshares.com for a prospectus containing this information. read it carefully.

welcome back to "squawk box.

i'm dominic chu here with your market minutes big banks a focus for many traders and investors. we'll start with the jpmorgan results out earlier. a big beat by one of the banks market value a 60% rise a lot of that happening in the last six months or so. down 2/3 of 1% in the premarket trade. earnings better than expected. revenues better than expected. watch jpmorgan helping drive the earnings results. jpmorgan and goldman sachs, those results out in the last few minutes. better than expected earnings and profits driven by robust investment banking options goldman up nearly 2% still waiting on wells fargo with a coinbase anticipated ipo and bitcoin going towards record prices, we are checking on stocks that have bitcoin on their balance sheets they own the actual product. tesla up 3%. microstrategy up 6%. square up about 1.5%

riot blockchain up 6%. bed, bath and yoint. bitcoin surge. the co be inasipo and much more. we will be right back. our imag, but they can't be held back. they want to be set free. to make the world more responsible, and even more incredible. ideas start the future, just like that. re-entering data that employees could enter themselves? that's why i get up in the morning! i have a secret method for remembering all my hr passwords. my boss doesn't remember approving my time off. let's just... find that email.

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wielcome back to "squawk box. you know our favorite company, bed, bath and beyond reporting quarterly results. courtney ragan joining us with a very special guest courtney. >> reporter: hi, good morning, andrew bed, bath & beyond did just report their results we have the ceo joininus for a first on cnbc interview. mark, thank you so much for joining us we saw an earnings beat. revenues about in line with what analysts expected. same store sales up 4% up 86% you're reaffirming your full-year revenue. when you look at the first quarter, it's going to be messy. stores were closed help us understand what we should be expecting about the current quarter.

>> yeah. good morning, courtney we spent a lot of time with investors and analysts really sharing a new platform for what 2021 will look like, including a turbulent q1 based on the ly history. we're learning that as a retailer we were nonessential so our stores were literally closed with zero revenue during this period so we have a lot of upside versus a lot of our competition. that will be expressed in our numbers. we're looking at true comp sales and looking at our two-year stack. that's looking very healthy as we enter the quarter our numbers will be defined by we're not anniversarying the businesses we've sold and the markets are clear around that. the stores we closed moving forward will be focusing on that comp sales with q2 to q4 for our business being more truly comparable >> and so bed, bath & beyond has long had inventory that could be bought elsewhere whether it's

amazon, your old employer, target, wayfair. why would a consumer look to bed, bath & beyond when quite frankly that online strategy had been behind. you're trying to catch up. can you take a play from target's playbook and improve the margins, improve the shipping speed there what can you do to make customers and shareholders happy? >> i think our 2020 results and q4 numbers just released reflect the pivot we've made focusing on digital. you're right we hadn't done that in the past. through our transformation we are omni always on unlocking the inventory in the home space to get customers the goods they need much faster than a lot of our competitors. things like same-day delivery are taking a major focus for the customer's attention instead of waiting two days to get something shipped, i can get it two hours at my local bed, bath & beyond we've always been a beloved home retailer and i think we've seen

over the last year that strength as well as new customers come to the fold through the digital channels for us managing our costs in digital become pivotal we've done that incredibly well we've seen during the fourth quarter, 41% of our business beats are filled by the stores it's just something that we hadn't experienced before. that helps us reduce costs and manage inventory in a very different way. >> is that going to be something that you believe continues when you talk about omni, that is obviously using online and in stores together, but we've seen a reluctance for many shoppers to return to the stores with the pandemic ongoing what are you seeing right now with consumers' interest in shopping in stores is there a correlation between vaccination rates and your traffic? >> yeah, look, i think the first thing to recognize is in the moment with digital is now a must customers are clearly understanding how to utilize digital in a 360 way and for us

becoming omni always we're benign to where that customer is shopping the important thing is they're coming to bed, bath & beyond shop online, come to the store or a combination, that muscle has been truly built and accelerated over the period of covid. what we're seeing coming through is new confidence from customers as the vaccines start to take hold it's still early there's a lot of ambiguity out there. it's different by state and regions. we are seeing a return to stores and a rebalancing of that digital and physical space clearly for us with nothing in the stores last year, it's exponential but there is a rebalancing coming through but digital i think is going to be strong gearing forward we're geared financially and structurally to manage that. >> well, thank you very much, mark, for joining us i know you're doing a lot with private brand launches we have to let you talk to investors on the earning call. we appreciate you coming to us.

>> thanks, courtney. courtney, thanks mike novogratz on the listing of bitcoin and fresh record territory here nearing 65,000. "squawk box" will be right back. with a hybrid, you can do both. that's why manufacturers are going hybrid with ibm. with watson on a hybrid cloud factories can use ai to automate the little things so they can focus on the next big thing. businesses that want to innovate at scale are going with a smarter hybrid cloud using the technology and expertise of ibm.

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one of the biggest listings, coinbase is going public after getting a reference price of $250

joining us with more insight into the crypto world is mike novogratz, galaxy digital founder and co-ceo go bengals. >> come on, bengals? it's bitcoin orange. >> what color is it? it's blood orange. >> it's close to bitcoin orange. closest i had in my closet. >> i thought you would have lasers coming out with some fancy sunglasses so bitcoin's almost 65,000 this is not the valuation that was bantyed about, the $100 billion valuation. who's helping whom is the coinbase listing juicing bitcoin or is bitcoin juicing the coinbase listing or both >> step back and let's not miss the big picture, right this is the netscape moment for the cryptocurrency economy remember netscape four years

before we had the crazy frenzy basically signaled the beginning of the internet age. this is a really important day for the whole crypto world, right? it's somewhat irrelevant where coinbase trades today. one point i want to take profits. mostly institutions are going to come flooding into the space we're seeing it every day. we're seeing it in bitcoin and in the public equity markets coinbase is the first big marquee equity where mutual funds will say i can make my statement in crypto this way i just think you don't want to miss by looking at the small technicals of what happens today the magnitude of the moment. >> if there was some private trends that went off at a much higher number, you think it's more prudent to bring it here or to have 65 billion because that's not 100 it's like 50% from 100.

>> let's see where it settles in when it starts trading those private markets were pretty small and there weren't a lot of liquidity so, listen, i remember in 2013 i was begging fred irsham to let me invest at an 80 million valuation and it was the great fish that got away because they ended up picking union squared ventures, dreson, and now if it's 65 or 100 billion it's been a spectacular ride for the investors and for brian and his team i think there is going to be a lot of demand from institutional equity market investors for a stock like coinbase. >> we had a long discussion earlier that i'm willing, 2.5% to buy bitcoin with a huge spread versus setting up my own whole deal and figuring it out, it's worth it but that's not going to stay like that. there's just no way.

it's going to be driven down like everything at some point, wouldn't you think so what's the growth >> the amount of talent coming into this space. the amount of competition coming into the space is going to drive competition. coinbase isn't a fintech company. it's a crypto ecosystem company. nobody understands how big that is all of a sudden out of nowhere comes nfts which is going to be a huge part of the crypto economy. so i think right now total crypto wealth is roughly $2 trillion so that's 1/2 of 1% of all wealth if you don't think in the next two to three years that can be 2 to 3%, you're not paying attention to the trends. so the amount of growth that we're going to see in our space is staggering. we're just getting started and what's important is institutions now realize this is an asset class it wasn't an asset class 8 months ago i was hoping it would be

i was praying it would be. i was trying to convince people it would be but now it's an asset class and every single participant we talk to is getting involved. >> i have to let melissa, i didn't understand she was wearing bitcoin orange all morning. >> i must have been subconscious when i got dressed bitcoin on the brain >> melissa has wells fargo. >> we're still digging through the numbers. the stock is trading slightly lower on the back results. it looks like 1.05 versus 70 cents estimate looks like the revenue line came in ahead of estimates, 18.06 versus 17.5. net interest income went down in the quarter which was interesting compared when you think about what spreads have done versus last year. we'll continue digging through. >> thanks, melissa what does this do for galaxy

digital? good for you bad for you? >> great for us. it's credentializing the space coinbase is going to be one of the stocks in people's portfolios we wan't to be one of them, too. we are kbroeg. we -- the kwquality of people is amazing. think about apple with a $2 trillion market cap in all of crypto with a $2 trillion market cap. if you put the entire apple team on one side of a football field and the entire crypto team from the ethereum guys, people in korea, bitcoin guys on the other side of the field, it would be applesauce the human capital invested in working in and around this crypto economy and crypto experiment which is a real part of the world is daunting so i just think the whole

economy is mispriced when you start looking two, three, four years looking forward. we want to take advantage of that we see ourselves a crypto economy company. >> mike, you made a reference to netscape when preparing coinbase to this moment, but it struck me because one of the things that's fascinating about netscape was it did create a moment and was hugely important in that moment but, of course, quickly disappeared from the scene we don't talk about netscape anymore. it got swallowed up with aol and everything else. so when you think about coin base, do you believe we're going to be talking about coinbase a decade from now, two decades from now >> a lot of that is how good brian armstrong is, the talent he attracts, how quick he innovates. there are some amazing entrepreneurs in this space. sam bankman fried at ftx is

doing things every dow dao kim in korea there's competition in every space. people see this will be an interesting place to make a career and build businesses. brian's done a pretty damn good job so far i think a lot of people are going to bet on him. time will tell he's got a -- that's an interesting story. when it was $6 billion i remember going up to tiger, i speak to lee fitzell who is one of the great private investors i thought he was overpaying at 6 billion. he said, novogratz, you don't understand this. they have the brand. i'm buying the brand he is probably celebrating today with a bottle of champaign, he should be. it was a great call on his part and tiger's investors are happy. >> mike, right now we are in a crypto summer right now in terms of where the cycle is clearly. i have to think. maybe i'm wrong about that, too, but what happens if we do have a

kr crypto winter again? do you think that's almost impossible to think about? >> well, listen, there can be -- listen, there's a lot of froth and frenzy right now you see some coins that don't even -- dogecoin last night went up 100%. retail is in a frenzy. we are going to see volatility soon prices will not go straight up every day, they will go up and then they will go down, but there is a constant lineup of real players moving into this space that gives us a support floor. goldman sachs is moving into the space. tech companies are moving into the space. so while i think we can have volatility in prices, we're not going to have volatility in the amount of people that are joining this new economy, right? we've just determined this is an asset class. you are building out infrastructure here's brian armstrong talking about central bank issuing digital currencies i've talked to six digital bank customers every one working on

their own digital bank currency. just to build that infrastructure is a huge lift. this is not all about bitcoin though bitcoin is a big part of it, it's about building a new financial markets infrastructure on blockchain. it's about building a new infrastructure for us to buy and sell i.p., art, collectibles on blockchain that's what this whole revolution is about. >> it's hard to figure out whether -- you know, when you get, you know, state-sponsored digital assets, why that's not disruptive for bitcoin and why it's additive for bitcoin. that's what's hard to figure out, mike. >> part of it is the mechanism that they'll trade on. if we have a dollar issued stable coin, we're going to have one from facebook called diem. we have one from circle and coinbase and uspc. same rails that bitcoin trades on but you won't have a wallet

crypto wallet. >> we'll have you back i want to talk about that issue. we've got to go right now. thanks, mike we'll be right back.

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jpmorgan all posting quarterly results. we have the numbers and market reactions ahead as the final hour of "squawk box" begins right now. good morning and welcome to "squawk box" here on cnbc. i'm joe kernen along with andrew ross sorkin and melissa lee. we've got four more hours of melissa, andrew. we've got to really appreciate it becky is off today >> sounds so final >> it does >> the countdown is on >> it's the first day of the rest of our lives in terms of earnings, and we have jpmorgan which initially was down and hurting the dow. now the dow is positive again. up a little. wells fargo, goldman sachs you didn't see the nasdaq?

it's trading up about 44 points or so. and the s&p up 4.5 the 10-year was down 1.65. it's a little strange that maybe some of this trading is at least the oxygen in equities being dictated by what's happening in crypto and digital i think we're all talking about it all morning long. that is the coin-base debut and would anyone have predicted this, three, four, five years ago that it would be so highly antipated? i don't think they send out, andrew, like tax info. i think you need a different company to do the damn tax info. if you used it for -- to buy something i think it's even worse. >> much more complicated. >> you've got to figure -- >> you have to figure out even if you sell one, there is tax due on that. you know, with as much as the irs wants to get their money, i figure they're going to look into it.

you can't just skate on that there's no way >> there's no question -- but that's the thing there's going to be all sorts of disclosures. new rules. we're going to see that. but this is probably bullish long term when i say there will be rules and regulations and disclosures. >> right >> bullish for the business over time you have to imagine once gary gensler gets in there and start digging in from the sec, i think these businesses become in many ways more resilient as a result. >> all right so big day for coin. investors are watching three other big stories this morning and our all-star team of cnbc reporters have them covered. leslie pick ers and meg tirrell.

>> buy and sell digital. $193 billion in trading. >> it's a one of a kind. >> coin base would have a $65 billion diluted. >> since this is a direct listing rather than a traditional ipo, the real number you want to be focused on is today's opening price. that will be the public market level by which investors are actually buying shares of coinbase i'm told to expect coinbase's

shares to open in the early afternoon or so, but it's important to know that buying shares of coinbase could be akin to stepping on a roller coaster. the company is expected to have tremendous volatility correlated to the volatility of bitcoin it says so that volatility is coinbase's number one risk factor timing is everything and crypto momentum could be a significant tailwind with bitcoin trading around record highs. i'll send it now over to meg >> reporter: leslie, thanks so much it's a big day in the vaccines world today. we'll hear from the cdc's outside advisers about the johnson & johnson vaccine and how they are looking at the events of six rare blood clots with j&j that caused the pause on vaccination with the vaccine here in the u.s. we talked with moderna's ceo this morning who said they have not seen similar events with their vaccine and we asked him what he thinks this event means

for vaccine hesitancy. here's what he said. >> this is yet another proof to the american people that we have the best regulatory agency in the world and they care deeply about the scientific and medical safety of a product. the fda will not hesitate to be very cautious, analyze the data, protect the safety of the american people. >> reporter: so bancel saying there he thinks on the contrary to increasing hesitancy, this could actually boost confidence in vaccines. moderna leasing a lot of its own data on its covid vaccine and others that it has using the same technology in the pipeline. on the covid vaccine, looking out six months from the second dose seeing vaccine efficacy of more than 90% and 95% against severe disease. also detailing plans for testing the vaccine in kids and updating it to cover variants and they are also increasing or talking

about their supply meeting all of their goals in terms of delivering 100 million doses by march, another 100 million by the end of may and a total of 300 million by the end of july and, guys, when it comes to other diseases showing some early data this morning in rsv, which is another respiratory virus. they're starting human trials in hiv and flu this year as well. wilf, sending it over to you >> reporter: meg, thanks so much the banks all beating on the bottom line. a couple of caveats. firstly, jpmorgan. eps ahead, 450 a share and forecast was 430 -- 3.10 jampy dimon said, quote, we do not consider this recurring profit worth pointing out that capital profits for j.p.m. as for goldman sachs fantastic. that theme continuing from last year similar theme in wells fargo's

numbers. eps 1.05 the forecast was 71 cents per share. wells fargo breaking out that was a 28 cent boost to credit -- due to that credit loss aspect which theirs was a 1 billion benefit. the forecast was for a 170 million cost worth pointing out while this can't be repeated forever, it probably can be repeated for quite a few quarters given the amount of reserves they built up last year and of course it's only because of better economic outlook they are releasing the reserves on to goldman sachs who like jpmorgan had fantastic capital markets. if we were picky we could point out that asset management revenue 4.6 billion against a forecast of 2.5. did come because of 3.3 million equity investments not all traditional asset management fee and equity trading. it had 1.1 billion in financing in it but this is a monster

quarter from goldman sachs revenue, 17.7 billion. the forecast was 12 billion. up 102% compared to the same quarter last year and up more impressively 51% quarter over quarter. we said last year this was a year for investment banks, how long can it go on? not only has it gone on into q1, it's gone up 50% quarter over quarter and 100% year over year. big beats for stocks goldman sachs, 1.3%. only 1.3% you might say. >> wilf, thank you our thanks as well to leslie and meg. we will look forward, by the way, to a couple of big interviews on the "closing bell" later this afternoon. meantime, let's talk about big market stories with stephanie link, chief investment strategist at hightower and cnbc contributor. stef, we talked about jpmorgan

what's your take on how the banks will trade and whether or not they'll continue their streak >> reporter: well, it's good to see you again. goldman sachs was as wilf said, an absolute blowout. jaw dropped total revenue up 102% record investment banking and people wonder about the sustainability backlog was at a record level. that's at 21% global revenue global market is 43% in that up 47% year over year and up 78% sequentially with equities growing 68% and fic up 31 in comparison to jpmorgan, fic was up 15% goldman has taken market share and humming on all cylinders annualized roe of 109% is the best since 2009.

i do like that report. that was obviously the best. wells fargo, we talked about it last hour. it's not really so much the quarter per se that really matters, it's really about the turn around. it's when they get the asset cap lifted, it's what they do on asset sales. they just sold off their corporate trust business and it's also about their expense base they have a goal to save $8 billion from their expense savings plan and let's get progress on that one thing about wells, their rotce was 12.7%. their goal is to get to 15%. everyone was very skeptical. last quarter it was 10%. they're making progress for sure within the segments of wells, the highlight clearly is wealth and investment management. that actually did quite well. >> the question is what is the extrapolation of all of these various data points this morning to the other banks out there, especially the ones you hold, like a morgan stanley. >> reporter: i mean, morgan stanley is a little bit

different animal than goldman sachs, right they used to look more similarly. now morgan stanley has diversified. i think they will do well especially on the wealth management let's see how they do on the integration. they will do very good synergies. only traded at 12 times earnings it's actually lagged year to date up only 16% of course, it was up 106% in the past year. i think morgan stanley is going to have a very good quarter. i think bank of america will have a solid quarter but i do not expect net interest income to be up i think we have to wait a couple quarters out as well as net interest margins that's the story in the second half of this year for bank of america. the stock has done very nicely up year to date. up 30% expectations are high. the valuation is attractive. i like those two very much but the theme we talked about earlier is really reserve releases people don't pay for that. that's why you want to try to

find other areas within banks where you can see valuation and value creation like i said, turn around at wells, morgan stanley is m&a and bank of america is the yield curve steepening. >> stef, good to see you stephanie link thanks, joe. brian armstrong talks competition and later senator shelley moore capito on the infrastructure bill, taxes and much more. ay tuned, you're watching "squawk box" on cnbc strengthening client confidence in you. before investing consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. go to flexshares.com for a prospectus containing this information. read it carefully.

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welcome back to "squawk. big day for coinbase going public under the ticker c-o-i-n. i spoke to brian armstrong and asked him a big question for investors. will transaction fees which make up 95% of the coinbase come down with competition what does that mean for the business >> we haven't seen any margin compression yet and wouldn't expect to see it in the short and the mid term the reason is for one thing, crypto is changing so quickly. it's accelerating in the pace of change in terms of the number of

assets and all of the things people want to do with crypto. no real risk of commoditization. i guess the other thing is that there's really a custody fee that's baked into the transaction fees which is different than the traditional brokerage world. i don't expect there to be fee compression short and mid term longer term, yes, there could be fee compression like in every other asset class out there. what you've seen is in our financials we've started to invest in different revenue streams that are starting to provide these green chutes of revenue. things like coinbase earn, coin-base debit card, staking revenue. and we've started to monetize a number of things like this our custody business for our institutional customers, for instance these are providing more steady predictable streams of revenue my guess is in five or ten years you'll see that be maybe

even 50% or more of our revenue. >> we're going to talk a lot more about coinbase in the next half hour with some early investors including alexis ohanian. up next, going to head to washington and talk taxes and infrtrtu wasucreith senator shelley moore capito right after this verizon frontline. the advanced network and technology for first responders. built on america's most reliable network. built for real interoperability. and built for 5g. it's america's #1 network in public safety. verizon frontline. built right for first responders. ♪ ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

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. joining us shelley moore capito is a ranking member of the environment and infrastructure senator, we've had representatives from both sides of the aisle on talking about this just to cut to the chase, what would you like to do in terms of infrastructure and how much would you like to spend doing it >> well, what i'd like to do is get back to what i considered the regular definition of infrastructure in terms of job creation so that's roads, bridges, ports, airports including broadband into that, water infrastructure. we've already made sort of our first step there in a bipartisan way through our committee we have a bill on water and wastewater infrastructure about $30 billion over five years and it works on some of the things

that are aspirational in president biden's plan so i think the best way for us to do this is hit the sweet spot of where we agree and i think we can agree on a lot of the measures moving forward. how much i would say probably into the 6 or 800 billion but we haven't put all of that together yet, but i think that if we're going to do this together, which we want to do and it is our desire, we've got to find those areas and take away the extra infrastructure area that the president has put into the bill with home health aides and all of that. >> the other thing is paying for what we've already spent on the last part of the bill. >> right. >> it would seem that you'd want to be somewhat frugal about what you would include. you'd want to get it done, obviously, what you just talked about. you really don't want to raise taxes a lot with the economy in the position that it's in right now. so what would you do to pay for

your 6 to $800 billion would you do usage do you think corporate taxes should go up maybe not in '28 but maybe manchin talks about '25. would you compromise there would that get your vote >> you know, i don't think there's going to be much appetite on the republican side for those of us who voted for the tax cuts and jobs bill in 2017 to raise taxes. i think we're -- and corporate taxes are a part of that i think what we saw in2020 pre-pandemic obviously was higher wages, more people working. people who had had trouble finding jobs were finding jobs and moving up in the employment chain, so to speak so we were having the desired results. we had trillions of dollars back into this country as a result of that no corporate inversions. i don't know why we would go back to that and put our country in a position where we're not as competitive as we are right now.

so how do we pay for it? this is a huge question. we know the gas tax is a declining resource we're going to be looking at that in a hearing today. vehicle miles travel is a possibility when you look at fleets or when you look at electric vehicles. we're going to look at assessing electric vehicles for road usage even though they don't pay into the gas tax. i think there's probably some coronavirus dollars that are going to be left unspent or very difficult to spend i think we should start cobbling that together. it's going to have to come from alot of different sources, but this is important. it is a job creator. i agree with the president on that and we have to pay for it, but we cannot raise taxes now when we're in such a precarious position moving out of this last year of the pandemic. >> do you see any hope at this point of movement on either side the president, we know that there are people that feel very strongly about the new green deal or at least components of

it and there has been an oil threat or at least incorporates a lot of new green deal thinking >> right. >> so republicans aren't going to go for that and, therefore, you're going to need to do it through reconciliation then you need to satisfy the most important man in the country, joe manchin at this point. how is it going to finally play out? is it going to be a reconciliation bill that will include a lot of stuff that appeases the president's left flank, if you will, and it's going to be, you know, settled by the vice president? >> well, i mean, i wouldn't be being fully forthright here if i didn't say that's my concern, that it is going to be a sort of march of folks going to the white house and we doing bipartisan work in our committees and in the end it becomes a partisan instrument. where i think we could really score some wins here for the

country is if we take the portions that we know we agree on and we move those through our committees that we're doing now. today we'll be working on the surface transportation part. we make it robust. we incorporate aspects of climate change like we did in our last highway bill in terms of electric vehicles, resiliency of materials, things that can withstand weather events those are areas that i think we have tremendous bipartisan agreement on let's pull that together and if there are other things that they want to do, they being the democrats or the president want to do in a more dramatic fashion that can't attract at least 10 republicans, that's their reconciliation vehicle that's what i would use to raise your taxes if that's what they want to do or to incorporate some of the things that i don't have to agree with, some more of the green new deal issues or more infrastructure issues i think we can find this

because, you know, it's spring here at the capitol. so spring -- what spring springs eternal. yeah, i know optimism springs eternal >> senator, on a different subject that's in the news this morning. >> sure. >> 700 companies and ceos have now published a letter in "the new york times" and the washington post today effectively condemning the idea of some of these voting bills that are being circulated now. 47 different states including west virginia, around potentially limiting voting, calling for making voting more accessible mitch mcconnell has criticized ceos for using their voice on this issue do you believe ceos should be speaking out >> oh, i think ceos should speak out on anything they want. it's freedom of speech and they have big voices. i don't have an objection to that what i do have an objection to is the sensationalizing of the

georgia law and other states where you're basically trying to codify what worked during the pandemic and then trying to move forward. my understanding is they increased the number of early voting days, they increased the lock boxes there's a lot in there i think that has been misconstrued and misrepresented i'm a function of having as many votes -- people voting we had historic numbers of voters in 2020 our state of west virginia is not doing election reform. the legislature has left town so that -- i'm not sure they're dealing with accurate data here. i think rather than pick each -- you know, pick things out that are going to be construed as limiting voting, let's look where we're opening up voting. more vote by mail. more abilities to early vote longer hours these are the things that worked under the pandemic and i think these are the things that states are looking at i think this is just a march to

be able to pass the big bill here, which politicizes the fec, which makes public financing campaigns a part of the law. there's all kinds of things in the voting rights bill that they're trying to move through the senate that is just way over the top. i don't know that these ceos are involved in that particular item, but i think they want the same things we do which is more people voting and we had them last time in millions and millions of new voters. >> senator, thank you for weighing in on this. >> thank you. >> good to see you hope to see you again soon you're important >> hope springs eternal. >> i didn't mean to favor that other senator from that great state of west virginia but -- >> we work well together senator manchin and i are long-time friends. >> very good thank you. melissa. coming up, early coinbase

investor alexis ohanian as that company plans to debut on the public market. stay tuned, you're watching "squawk box" on cnbc eleven. why do an expense report from your phone when you can do it from a machine that jams? i just emailed my wife's social security number to the entire company instead of hr, so... please come back. how hard is your business software working for you? with paycom, employees enter and manage their own hr data in one easy-to-use software. visit paycom.com for a free demo. hon? first off, we love each other...

coinbase and bitcoin is trading at 64,228. coming up, alexis ohanian. >> i'm an investor i'm bullish and i'm betting innovation and cryptocurrency is still evolngvi

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coinbase going public today through a direct listing i spoke with co-founder brian armstrong in an exclusive interview. i asked him why he chose this path over what's become the way to do this du jour or a traditional ipo or spac. here's what he said. >> i think spacs and ipos are all reasonable ways to go public there's not a wrong way to do it we would have had a good outcome. for me, i was excited about direct listing number one, i wanted there to be just a true market on day one that set the price, not something that was set behind closed doors and a small number of people got to buy in early or something like that. i felt like it was more true to the ethos of crypto. i thought it might more truly give us a price that the market decided versus a guess that we all had come up with we'll see how it goes.

i'm excited about the direct listing approach they had a strong balance sheet. opportunities to do that as a public company as well >> we've seen companies like palantir and roblox open up 30% above the reference price. how will brian measure success on day one >> i'm not a big fan of pop. that's a strange narrative that's emerged over time pop, on the one hand it's good, it means there's interest, but the company in the traditional ipo sold the shares at below market price so it's kind of a double-edged sword i just want the markets to try to set the price and we'll see how it turns out. >> coinbase's valuation is affecting the scene of the new york stock exchange.

i asked brian how investors should think of a comp if it's fintech more aligned with the paypals or squares or more like an exchange? >> so this is one of those companies where it's tough to come up with an exact comparable it's like saying is tesla a car company? it's a software company. or you can come up with an example. is amazon a retailer sort of but it's also a software company coinbase, it's technology. it's software. it's cyber security. it also has aspects of financial services with compliance and legal and various licenses that we've gotten so you could say that's finance and technology that's fintech i think there's some truth to that it's actually kind of different because most fintech companies are really building, you know, i would say kind of like the ux layer on top of all of the same

underlying rails, whether that's ach transfers or swift or wire transfers or credit cards. so a lot of their services look similar, they can innovate in the ux layer there's pricing and the transactions are similar undernth we're the first fintech vertically integrated. we own the customer relationship all the way down to integrating with the underlying rails themselves and of course these are brand-new rails, the cryptocurrency block chains out there that are inherently global they're cross border they're allowing transaction confirmation times to come down. they're allowing fees to come down at least when things are working well we need to keep scaling blockchains. building on the new rails is a cool opportunity to create a new type of company. crypto company it's a new category. >> i also asked brian about a letter and note that he published last year about the purpose of his company and the

role of corporations in politics and social issues given the politics we've been having in voting laws and the role of corporations i asked brian to explain his point of view and it's controversial. >> this was a very interesting moment for us last year. i think coinbase is a company that has people from all different backgrounds, all different skill sets we're all very different that's a very important part of our culture, but we all want to have this kind of, you know, thing in common which is our passion and belief for the mission. that's kind of what we all signed up to work on, how do we create more economic freedom in the world. yes, there are a lot of other problems in the world and we can all at coinbase acknowledge those problems we don't agree on what the solution is to the problems. my point of view is companies today with great intentions sometimes end up creating division and actually unwelcoming environments internally by engaging in some of these issues.

i think every company should pick something big they want to solve in the world for us that's economic freedom it's important to be aligned and be in the same direction to go tackle something that ambitious. >> what do you see when you see -- i believe there's going to be 600 signatories to a statement that the two pens have put together about voting rights to corporate leaders across the country. what do you think when you see that do you think there should be a role when it comes to businesses around big issues of voting in our democracy which allows companies like yours and companies like mine and all of us to actually do what we do >> yeah. well, i mean, i think it depends on the company, right? a company can define the mission however they want. if they have in scope voting rights, which i think are important to all of us, then that's great they should probably go focus on that if the company is not focused on

that, i a little bit question why they would get involved. i think it's tough to say because, again, we can all agree there's a problem. doesn't mean we all agree on the solution depends how we want people to spend their work days. >> you can catch a lot more of that interview with brian armstrong. you can do it on cnbc.com including what he makes of nfts in a web extra web extra. he just got involved in an nft song you have to hear what he has to say about that. joining us to talk a lot more about coinbase and this big day, one of the earliest coinbase investors from the seed round nearly a decade ago. congratulations to you, alexis ohanian, founder of 776 and founder of red dit dit. >> i still was skeptical

he had just left that. competitive. and when someone candidly with the reddit communities including r/bitcoin and even back in 2012 there was a very clear indication of what looked almost like a religion kind of devotion to some bigger ideas, some bigger purpose and some pretty smart technologists building infrastructure, talking about the potential for this and backing it up with work. you combine those things and you invest in the right founders and

oftentimes stuff happens and one of the reasons i love getting to do this job. >> well, kudos to you. when you think about just the path this is now on, just the institutions that are now getting involved in this, all of the money that's flowing into this, it is great obviously for coinbase on a day like today and given where they are, they're ahead of the game, but it's also bringing in lots of competition. i'm curious how you think that coinbase is going to deal with that competition over time i talked to brian a little bit about the potential price compression, margin compression on transaction fees and the like >> yeah. the one thing -- this cannot be -- you really can't over state it because it's so important. because this company's dna from the very beginning was around crypto, everything they've done intentionally, whether it's on the securities side, products side, user experience, all of

that has very much got the ethos of making it as easy as possible to access these markets, to get into crypto, to be that on ramp. you really can't overstate the kind of product focus. everyone else, they're finding ways too build this into doing their business this is a lot of heavy lifting and software that is easier said than done. i do think over time more and more institutions are allowing more and more access to the asset class. it's proven out of viability and i think because coinbase has always been from day one a crypto company, it's going to continue to give them an edge. it's all good overall for the market >> alexis, isn't that very narrowly looking at who the competitors could be i mean, talking about institutions, i get that they don't have crypto in their dna and they're sort of backtracking at this point, but aren't there just a host of startups that

could actually disintermediate coinbase much in the same way that robinhood did to an etrade or ameritrade or schwab robinhood came up out of nowhere and compressed fees very, very rapidly across the industry. >> yeah. i mean, look, there is undoubt te tedly that potential one of the things that gets me so excited about doing this and investing is i am constantly looking for new companies that are looking to drink the milk shake of old incumbents. coinbase is not a stayed old incumbent. i really think the position they've forged, the reputation that they've built, those are enduring things and having a company of, you know, 1,000 plus really talented, motivated people aligned with this

singular vision of getting people on ramped to crypto is quite formidable i have not had the courage to try to invest in a competitor just yet >> i've got to ask you straight up, and i don't fault you if you do try to take some money off the table, but do you plan to stay fully invested with coinbase >> certainly for the day and for the foreseeable future i mean, i've been -- i try not to do any of this math ahead of time because i just don't take anybody for granted but, you know, we'll see in the coming weeks. i'm still very long. i very much have diamond hands when it comes to coinbase and bitcoin overall. if i take some money off the table, there's some philanthropic work i want to get started at seven seven six you know, i think long term the vast, vast majority of my coinbase shares aren'tgoing

anywhere. >> how are you thinking, by the way, about the prices of crypto? clearly there's more interest than ever. you're seeing bitcoin over 64,000 there's a huge interest in aethereum, partly the view that there's perhaps a better use case also that there hasn't been nearly as much attention on it how are you thinking about those prices and the opportunities to make more money? this thing's gone up 1,000%. is it going to go up another 1,000% people put their money where they think the best use case is going to be in the future. >> yeah, look, when i use that word religion very deliberately when i described the early bitcoin community in 2012. what's interesting about this whether it's bitcoin or aethereum, a big part of what makes it work is people's undying belief in sort of the strength of their faith in what it can do and what it's doing. it creates this virtuous cycle

the rise of nfts have shown more credibility and functionality for somebody like aethereum. they'll have programmable money. what's really interesting about what would come in the next few months is that a lot of people who are already sort of missionaries, let's say, for this religion are going to come into even more wealth. they are undeniably going to reinvest in maybe some traditional things but also a lot of alternatives that are related to crypto and crypto ecosystem as prices tend to grow you had me on talking about gamestop and i think these are reflections of a changing dynamic that very much hold up in the world of crypto where if you have a community that really believes in something, especially when that something in the case of bitcoin or aethereum has more and more enduring real value, really, really sort of unprecedented

things happen because more and more people coordinati online can continue to give more and more momentum for why this is going to endure and build upon it improve upon it and i just this of room to run, and you know, i'm still cautiously optimistic, though slightly less so, at least less cautious and more exuberant than i was eight years ago when i came on here. but what has mattered so much has been this huge experience and bringing this technology to more and more people is i think going to unlock more and more creativity and more and more opportunity and that's only a good thing. >> alexis, final question, you know, you've got a lot of portfolio companies and you have a strong voice within so many of them, are you recommending to any of your ceos that they take whatever cash they have and put it in crypto themselves? not them personally, i'm saying company cash >> yeah, for some of the later stage companies, yes, and i think, i think companies like

tesla have been a really good bellwether for. >> this the earlier stage company, you know, the volatility is just too much of a risk the company is only a few years old. maybe only has a couple of million on the balance sheet but the later stage ones, to put a portion of it in bitcoin, yes, absolutely. >> alexis ohanian, great to see you, kudos on the investment and kudos by the way on your home studio which every time i see you improves, the lighting, it keeps getting better and better. >> it's working. >> it's great. and i want to know about that, i see the basketball behind you, we'll have a conversation about that next time i see you talk to you soon. >> all right sounds good. thank you. >> joe >> thanks. let's get to jim cramer for his take on the day's big stories. one of the headline, goldman sachs, investment banking is great but one of the headlines jim was about reddit and gamestop fueled trading revenue, now goldman sachs is a david then, are they, against the big

bad goliath suits. nice to ldman going okay on this so it's not all just the little guy and retail guys making money off of gamestop and reddit >> well, i think that goldman, look, first of all, numbers are about as clean as you can get, i think when you see the kind of trading they're doing, they're all over the place i think it's necessary i think this is a real number. and if you get rid of any equity holdings that they, have it is still a great enough i think they can do 40 i don't know why you shouldn't put at least a ten multiple on it that should be the target price of where it can go and i just like the fact that the markets are doing well, the apple cart is doing well, every line is pretty positive. i listened just now to reddit founder and what i think about it is, is that look, maybe these people are here to stay, but they want to get a little more diversified and they ought to lose their anger, i was proposing that gamestop issue

stock and pay down debt and i was lified, now they did it and they're loved, i think the anger's got to be stopped, joe it's just not worth it. >> well, good luck, jim, because that's everywhere, isn't it? social media's fault, don't you think? partly >> yeah, it is, well, i mean look, it's so easy to make up a name, and attack, if we want to, if twitter did not allow people to make up names it would be a really pleasant place. maybe they're afraid of losing daus but wouldn't that be something to have a real user name and then attack like that, you could go to their boss, everybody has a boss everyone has a boss. i think periodically i'd call people out. >> but you got your name there mine, they can figure out who i am so yeah, we do need to, that's right, we got one handle. >> i'm happy with, you know, to me, why attack me, i'm just going to block you what's the point of setting up

the name and set up a new name, i'm going to block you i get up earlier than they do, i stay up later than they, do and be my guest, you're just going to get blocked in the end. a waste of your time. >> and we didn't talk about coinbase at all. how long does it take. >> going higher. >> yeah, but before competition just squeezes some of those big transaction fees that the company has? >> first, i mean they take market share every year, and it's pretty remarkable and second, i think what's going to happen is a lot of people always fear these other outfits you know if you have coinbase, your crypto is going to be fine. i think the other guys they have to prove their reputation before people do business with them, even if they cut their fees so coinbase really just is not talking nearly enough about how you're not afraid if you buy a coinbase some of the other guys are giving such huge interest rates that you have to worry >> well, we had that discussion about the -- >> look, andrew's been great,

right? andrew's got all day, right, we shouldn't watch tv, we just watch andrew andrew, what do you think? >> i'd watch you all day, jim. >> he would love that. >> i happen to love the interview. i think the interview is unbelievable it's gripping. the guy is unbelievable. the cfo is fabulous. i love coinbase. i agree with lisa that it is going to 600 and he gave up airbnb? >> totally a great interview. i'm having a little fun. >> whatever you think of coinbase, brian arm strong is the real deal. >> he is very much the real deal. >> and you're the real deal. >> if you're involved in voting rights, i can see maybe you would want to say something, otherwise i hope you're focusing on your job. wow, what a concept. >> i knew you'd like that. >> you did, didn't you

>> we all want voting rights okay see you, jim >> andrew, my wife is here, she's loved the whole interview. but she's in her pjs >> thank you. later this morning on tech eweck, don't miss slack ceo start butterfield. stay tuned "squawk box" will be right back. sales are down from last quarter but we are hoping things will pick up by q3. yeah...uh... doug? sorry about that. umm... what...its...um... you alright? [sigh] [ding] never settle with power e*trade. it has powerful, easy-to-use tools to help you find opportunities, 24/7 support when you need answers plus some of the lowest options and futures contract prices around. don't get mad. get e*trade and start trading today.

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welcome back to "squawk box. let's talk about some of the big movers today outside of jpmorgan, goldman sachs and wells fargo, shares of bed bath and beyond taking a lit, down some 8 to 9% pre-market, the home goods and house wares retailer posting better than expected profit, sales down almost 10% now next up, shares of jet blue flying high around 3%, 130,000 shares of volume, the airline gets an upgrade from, to overweight from underweight. better cost controls and a more compelling valuation the shares are up 2% right now and end on shares of moderna higher by 2.5% 200,000 shares plus of volume pre-market the biotech company says new data on the covid vaccine shows it is more than 90% effective

six months after the second dose, the study by the way is based on data involving more than 900 cases of the virus. the gains take on to the 7% gains we saw in yesterday's session. i'll send things back to you, melissa. >> thank you, great to be with you this morning make sure you join us tomorrow "squawk on the street" is up next good wednesday morning, welcome to "squawk on the street," i'm carl quintanilla, david faber and jim cramer, what a morning, jpm and goldman earnings kicks off, coinbase goes public in a landmark day for crypto and that's where our road map will start. bitcoin topped 64,000. the irs points to crypto in closing the massive tax gap and enter earnings with banks in focus, jpmorgan, goldman and wells fargo all releasing their numbers this