Coinbase Global, America’s largest cryptocurrency trading site, will go public on Wednesday on the Nasdaq via direct listing at a reference price of $250 per share, the company announced this week.
With more than 190 million outstanding shares, this pricing gives Coinbase a valuation exceeding $47 billion, more than eight times higher than the company’s private price in 2018, though this may fall significantly after the stock begins trading on Wednesday.
Last month, in what was one of their last opportunities to buy and sell their stake in the cryptocurrency exchange before it went public, private investors traded the stock at a $350 per share pricing on the Nasdaq private market auction.
Unlike an initial public offering with banks acting as underwriters to the deal, a direct listing creates no new shares and sells only existing shares to the public resulting in no dilution and no lockup period before the stock can be traded.
Coinbase recorded $1.8 billion in revenue over the first three months of 2021, a massive jump from the $585.1 million worth of revenue netted in the final quarter of 2020.
The company has been riding the same wave of popularity that propelled the world’s largest cryptocurrency bitcoin into the spotlight in recent years.
Chief executive and co-founder Brian Armstrong started Coinbase alongside Fred Ehrsam in 2012, at a time when the words ‘bitcoin’ and ‘blockchain’ were still far outside the vernacular.
Fast forward eight years and by the end of 2020, the company reported 43 million verified users with $90 billion worth of assets - months before bitcoin reached its highest price of $60,000, setting off another round of public interest.
There have been hiccups along the way. Coinbase reached a $6.5 million settlement last month with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission over claims that the exchange had published misleading transaction data.
