NYSE Opens Green for Coinbase and Nvidia While Crypto Stock Shorts Sit on a Powder Keg
The opening bell on the NYSE and Nasdaq rang at its usual 9:30am ET on Tuesday, September 29, but the stocks moving in the first minutes told a story that has nothing usual about it.
Coinbase (COIN) opened at roughly $193.67, up from Monday's close of $191.79, before settling near $193.16-193.27 by 9:36am ET, a gain of close to 1%. Nvidia (NVDA) opened stronger, at $231.48 versus a $228.86 prior close, a jump of about 1.1%, before easing back to $230.54 a few minutes later. Strategy, the company formerly known as MicroStrategy (MSTR), opened closer to flat at $157.67-157.84 against a $157.14 close.
The moves lined up with Bitcoin's own early rebound. After sliding to roughly $82,500-83,100 overnight on rising Treasury yields and oil prices, BTC climbed back above $84,000 in the hour before the US open, up around 1% on the day, according to CoinDesk market data. The 10-year Treasury yield held near 5.25%, its highest level since 2007, a backdrop that has made investors jumpy about anything that doesn't pay a coupon, Bitcoin included.
What makes this open worth a second look is what's sitting underneath those numbers. In a note this week, short-interest tracker S3 Partners flagged Strategy and Coinbase as the two most "squeezable" names in the market right now, with a combined squeeze score more than double the street average. Total short interest across crypto-linked stocks sits at $10.7 billion, and MicroStrategy and Coinbase alone make up 84% of it. Translation: a lot of traders are betting these stocks fall, in a market where Bitcoin has already produced a 64%+ year-to-date run and Strategy's stock is up roughly 179% over the same stretch, according to the same report. If Bitcoin holds these levels or pushes higher, some of those shorts may be forced to buy back in, which can turn a rally into a sharper one.
There's a second layer to this story that's less about today's tape and more about the plumbing underneath it. On September 17, the SEC unveiled a five-year exemption letting platforms offer trading in blockchain-based, or "tokenized," versions of stocks and other securities, outside many of the rules that currently apply to the Nasdaq and NYSE. Tokenized shares carry the same dividend and voting rights as the real thing, the SEC said, but they can trade and settle on a blockchain, in theory 24/7. Robinhood already runs tokenized "Stock Tokens" for users in more than 120 countries on its own Robinhood Chain, live since July 1.
None of that has replaced the 9:30am bell yet. But it's the direction of travel: a market structure where the difference between a "crypto stock" and a "tokenized stock" gets thinner every quarter, and where the open of a Tuesday session on Wall Street increasingly shares a data feed with a market that never actually closes.
This is market commentary and public data, not financial advice. Prices and short-interest figures move fast; always check a live quote before acting on any of it.
