Unless you have been living under a rock, you have probably witnessed the sudden and dramatic rise of cryptocurrency (especially Bitcoin) in the last few months, with not just an insane increase in value but also in trust. Thus, at the moment, companies dabbling in the crypto world have been on a wild ride, adding billions to their name. The biggest and most ubiquitous of them all- Coinbase, had filed to go public last month. Now, the firm has submitted plans to sell around 114.9 million shares in its direct listing IPO at Nasdaq, in what can be a historic event in the share market.
The San-Francisco based firm has been growing both in reputation and value for some time now, though a few still remain apprehensive of the whole broker system. Nonetheless, even those on the fence agree that platforms like Coinbase have been ballooning in value, and so far, there seems no end in sight for the crypto frenzy.
This announcement comes on the heels of bitcoin hitting a record high price on Saturday, of around $61,782.
Coinbase currently has more than 43 million users in over a hundred countries. In its last funding round of 2018, which included investors like Tiger Global, IVP, Andreessen Horowitz and Ribbit Capital, the company raised $300 million, which valued the platform at $8 billion. Now it is being estimated that the IPO could value the company at higher than $100 billion.
An amended S-1 filing with the U.S Security and Exchange Commission provided the details of this announcement. Apart from the number of shares up for sale, it shared that the firm will be listed on the Nasdaq listing with the ticker COIN.
A direct public listing is somewhat different from a traditional IPO. They aim to give companies another road to going public while levelling the playing field for the investors. This method mainly removes the underwriters- such as large banks and investment houses- and companies sell new shares and raise fresh capital directly in a single large transaction.
Interestingly, the IPO is not the only thing on Coinbase’s plate at the moment. Recently, the company’s Chief Executive, Brian Armstrong, was heard enlisting ‘ambassadors’ who would donate in cryptocurrency for the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.
