The share price of the platform to exchange cryptocurrencies rises more than 30% on its first day on the Nasdaq.
The cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase debuted on the Nasdaq on Wednesday and became the first company in the “crypto” ecosystem to hit Wall Street.
In the first minutes of its debut – which was at noon – Coinbase’s stock price rose to $ 429, an increase of 72%. With the current price of around $ 330, the cryptocurrency platform is heading for a valuation of more than $ 94 billion.
The San Francisco-based firm was valued at just under $ 6 billion last September, but has climbed in line with bitcoin’s gains this year.
Coinbase is integrated into the Nasdaq through a direct listing operation and not the traditional public offering for sale, so it does not issue new securities or use large banks as mediators, but current shareholders make their securities available to the public.
With the arrival of Coinbase on the Stock Exchange, many experts consider it can open the way to other firms in an increasingly diversified ecosystem, despite the fact that cryptocurrencies continue to not become a widespread means of payment.
“The correlation with bitcoin will be very high after the stock stabilizes after the IPO,” said Larry Cermak, research director at cryptocurrency website The Block. “When the price of bitcoin goes down, it is inevitable that Coinbase’s income and the inherent price of the shares will also go down.” In fact, the price of bitcoin reached a new high of more than $ 63,000.
Prior to its IPO, Coinbase presented good results for the first quarter of fiscal 2021: with 56 million users and 7,000 institutional investors on its platform, it registered a quarterly income of $ 1.8 billion, higher than the annual income of 2020. .
It also has a market share of 11% in cryptocurrency trading services, up from 5% in 2018.