Coinbase: News about pre-market contracts causes a stir

With Coinbase's upcoming Wall Street debut, tension is mounting. Now the platform opens a secondary market for its own shareholders.

Shortly before the Initial Public Offering (IPO), the largest crypto broker in the USA Coinbase caused a sensation with a message to the shareholders. It states that a secondary market for the private stocks will be launched on the Nasdaq Private Market. Basically, this step is nothing unusual. Nasdaq Private Market is a trading platform for companies that they can use in the run-up to an IPO. This enables shareholders and investors to generate secondary capital before the actual IPO.

According to media reports, the shareholders received a message from Coinbase, according to which more detailed details would be provided in an email on Monday lunchtime. In mid-December of last year , Coinbase filed its IPO application with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). According to a report by the business portal Business Insider , the crypto exchange is working with the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

The IPO of a giant like Coinbase is of course very eagerly awaited. Experts assume that Coinbase will enter the public market via direct listing and not via a standard IPO. A great deal of interest from investors seems inevitable. The pre-trading contracts are already traded on the FTX . The price is currently around 290 US dollars.  The current valuation of The Block Crypto sees the market value of Coinbase at 70 billion US dollars, as the issue volume is said to be 250 million units.

Coinbase presents an impressive balance sheet

The pre-IPO contracts expire on the first trading day, but can also be valid until June 1, 2022 at the latest. Just last Friday, the crypto trading platform published an absolutely impressive set of figures. New information on the Coinbase About page last Friday shows that the platform currently has over $ 90 billion in assets. In total there are over 43 million registered users. The updated figures were collected as part of the Coinbase 2020 annual review and are current as of December 31, 2020.