2021 is shaping up to be a landmark year for the cryptocurrency landscape. While bitcoin is continuing to discover new all-time price highs, one of the industry’s leading exchanges, Coinbase, is set to go public via a direct listing — heralding a new era for digital finance.
According to Bloomberg, shares in Coinbase traded between $350 and $375 based on a recent private Nasdaq auction — indicating a pre-IPO company value of up to $100 billion.
As we can see from the chart above, as bitcoin’s price has grown, so too has the trading volume that Coinbase has experienced. As the final quarter of 2020 brought with it new all-time highs for the world’s first cryptocurrency, trading volume on the exchange nearly doubled — bolstered by an unprecedented level of institutional traders.
It appears that Coinbase’s decision to go for a direct listing rather than through investment bank underwriting has been made as a subtle nod to the company’s long-standing slogan from 2013: “Welcome To The Future of Money,’ while justifying its status as a “people’s exchange.”
In taking up the direct listing approach, Coinbase has the ability to welcome a greater level of liquidity while also utilizing a level of transparency that can result in a more natural way for the stock market to settle on a share price for the company.
