Coinbase , the platform for operations and exchanges with cryptocurrencies , has starred this Wednesday in one of the largest IPOs of the year by debuting on the Nasdaq technology market on Wall Street with a valuation of around 85,000 million dollars.
Analysts say that the first IPO of such a company marks a turning point in the cryptocurrency market, comparing it to when the Netscape browser went public in 1995 and kicked off the era of dot-com gold.
Coinbase was founded in June 2012 by Brian Armstrong with the idea of democratizing the purchase and sale of this type of currency: “Anyone, from anywhere, should be able to send and receive bitcoins in a simple and secure way,” according to its website.
Coinbase is not alone
Coinbase began working only with bitcoins, at a time when they were trading at $ 15 . This Wednesday, coinciding with the IPO, bitcoin set a new record close to $ 65,000 .
But while Coinbase has been the first of its kind to go public, it is not the only one . The rise of cryptocurrencies has multiplied the number of start-ups and firms that try to facilitate trade with these currencies, bring it to the general public and thus take advantage of the boom.
Coinbase itself faces large competitors such as Gemini or Binance.
Coinbase’s going public comes at a time when the crypto economy is spreading into the normal economy . Recently, Tesla announced that its electric vehicles can be purchased with bitcoin, while the credit card entities Visa and Mastercard will allow to operate with cryptocurrencies , and the big banks, with firms such as Morgan Stanley at the fore, begin to give the arm to twist in cryptocurrency investments.
Fraud alerts
However, the authorities in the US continue to be reluctant to observe digital currencies: both the president of its central bank, Jerome Powell , who considers them “speculative assets”, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, who sees them as a method. payment “inefficient”, according to his latest statements.
In Spain, already in 2018 the central bank and the CNMV warned against these operations , since they did not enjoy any protection and in them “there is a high risk of loss or fraud.”
“They cannot be considered a good store of value or a stable unit of account,” he says.
Thus, companies that act as gateways to buy and sell bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies intend to make operations more transparent, avoiding that the user has to search on their own in sites where they can be deceived. They also seek to reduce the bad reputation of these currencies and their association with scam, hackers and deepweb ,
Astronomical growth
Headquartered in San Francisco, the company ended FY2020 with 43 million verified users in a hundred countries and with assets worth $ 90 billion , while its annual results showed net profits of more than $ 322 million (in the financial year 2019 recorded losses) with a turnover of 1,300 million.
Debuting under the COIN ticker , Coinbase opened in the second half of the day at 381 dollars, above the 250 dollars established as a reference and reached 429 dollars – momentarily triggering its capitalization to about 100 billion – to later gradually decrease to close at $ 328, or 30% from the reference price.
These numbers have made Brian Armstrong, its founder and CEO , one of the richest people on the planet.
Armstrong assured that Coinbase wants to be the first “crypto” company in the world to fully compete with the financial giants. “We want to be treated on an equal footing with traditional financial services,”