Back in 2013, Union Square Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson announced his $5 million round investment in COINBASE.
“We believe that Bitcoin represents something fundamental and powerful, an open and distributed Internet peer to peer protocol for transferring purchasing power,”
At that time Bitcoin was trading around $111. Now that amount has improved to around $63K.
Today, Coinbase is going Public with $100bn+ IPO, around 43 million active users and $322 million in revenues in 2020, all of these despite the performance of the previous year (in 2019 Coinbase registered a loss of $ 32 million).
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But what exactly does Coinbase do?
Coinbase offers a wide range of products including cryptocurrency investing, an advanced trading platform, custodial accounts for institutions, a wallet for retail investors, and its own U.S. dollar stable coin.
One of the biggest users of their services is Tesla, the company owned and managed by Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world according to Forbes.
With that being said, why is this IPO so important?
Coinbase has a strong market share in the Crypto space and will have a first mover advantage as a public company. It is expected that many traditional banks and financial institutions will eventually move into the Crypto market. This means that in the next few years, we may see a legitimatization of the Crypto space by incumbent institutions. As this market matures the overall importance and value of the Crypto market may increase significantly.
This direct listing IPO is a milestone in the journey of Crypto from being an interesting fringe asset class to a more mainstream asset. The growing acceptance of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and increased volume of Crypto transactions mean it is important to understand what has been a kind of parallel universe as it moves more and more mainstream.
Raimondo Perfetto
VP of European Sales
rperfetto@tvmarkets.com