Coinbase IPO: News on pre-IPO contracts causes a stir
With Coinbase’s Wall Street debut looming, excitement is building. Now the platform is opening a secondary market for its own shareholders.
Just ahead of its Initial Public Offering (IPO), Coinbase, the largest crypto broker in the US, is causing a stir with an announcement to shareholders. It says that it is launching a secondary market for its Bitcoin Union private shares on the Nasdaq Private Market. Basically, there is nothing unusual about this move. Nasdaq Private Market is a trading venue for companies to use in the run-up to an IPO. Shareholders and investors are thus able to generate secondary capital before the actual IPO.
According to media reports, the shareholders received a message from Coinbase, according to which more precise details would be provided in an email on Monday afternoon. Coinbase filed its IPO application with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in mid-December last year. According to a report by the business portal Business Insider, the crypto exchange is working with the investment bank Goldman Sachs for this.
The IPO of a giant like Coinbase is naturally awaited with great excitement. The experts assume that Coinbase will enter the public market via a direct listing and not via a standard IPO. A great deal of investor interest seems pre-programmed. The pre-IPO contracts are already being traded on the FTX. The price is currently around 290 US dollars. The current valuation of The Block Crypto sees the stock market value of Coinbase at 70 billion US dollars, as the issue volume is to be 250 million units.
Coinbase presents impressive balance sheet
The pre-IPO contracts expire on the first day of trading, but can also be valid until 1 June 2022 at the latest. Just last Friday, the crypto trading platform published an absolutely impressive set of figures. New information on the Coinbase About page from last Friday shows that there are over 90 billion US dollars in assets on the platform as of today. In total, there are over 43 million registered users. The updated figures were collected as part of Coinbase’s 2020 Year in Review and are current as of 31 December 2020.
In this report, we take you on a comprehensive tour of the crypto asset class and share our unique perspective on how and why these institutions are engaging in the market,
wrote Brian Foster of Coinbase Institutional in the report’s cover letter.
Coinbase also has some institutional investors to thank for the huge rise in its assets. MicroStrategy and Ruffer Investment, for example, were among the institutions that used the prime brokerage service to significantly increase their bitcoin investments in recent months.