The Coinbase S-1 application for listing its securities on the stock market has been made public. The company filed an application in confidence with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in December 2020. On February 25, the regulator approved it, removing the main obstacle to Coinbase’s gaining the status of a public company.
As the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati explains, the pricing committee determines the price of shares after the entry into force of the application, but they can begin to circulate not earlier than the next day. Coinbase will be listed on the largest tech exchange, the Nasdaq, under the ticker COIN. During preliminary trading, the company’s capitalization was estimated at more than $ 100 billion.
“We have applied to list our Class A common shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker“ COIN ” , the exchange said.
Among other things, the document contains information that Coinbase’s revenue for 2020 was $ 1.28 billion, more than doubling from $ 534 million in 2019. Coinbase’s revenue for the period up to 2020 amounted to $ 3.4 billion. 96% of the company’s revenue comes from commissions paid by users when making transactions on the platform.
In addition, the company says it has approximately 43 million retail customers and 7,000 establishments among its customers. It also has 115,000 ecosystem partners. 2.8 million customers carry out monthly transactions on the platform. At the end of 2019, there were 1 million of them.The trading volume of Coinbase since its inception in 2012 exceeded $ 456 billion, and the volume of assets on the platform – $ 90 billion.
“We expect our operating expenses to rise substantially in the foreseeable future and may be unable to achieve profitability or positive cash flow from operating activities on an ongoing basis, which could negatively affect our business, operating performance and financial conditions, ” warns the exchange.
So, although we received a net income of $ 322.3 million in 2020, our net loss for 2019 was $ 30.4 million. «
Also in the document, Coinbase discloses the earnings of its CEO Brian Armstrong for 2020 – $ 59.5 million, of which $ 1 million is salary, $ 56.67 million is option compensation, and $ 1.8 million is other compensation. The exchange notes that it is assisted in its listing-related issues by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Securities and Citigroup, adding that it has grown organically over the years with minimal external funding and marketing costs.
Coinbase’s main shareholder at the current stage is venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, who owns over 5.5 million shares, followed by Armstrong with 2.7 million shares. At the same time, the latter owns 21.8% of the vote, while together 11 governors control 54% of the vote.
As of the end of 2020, Coinbase had the following reserves :
- $ 1.1 billion in traditional currency and its equivalents,
- $ 48.9 million was placed in USDC stablecoin,
- $ 130.1 million in bitcoin ,
- $ 23.8 million in Ethereum ,
- $ 34 million in other cryptoassets .
It is curious that Satoshi Nakamoto , the creator of Bitcoin, is listed as one of the recipients of the public version of the Coinbase application , identified by the address to which 50 BTC were sent from the genesis block of the cryptocurrency. FTX-traded Coinbase is up 10% above $ 420 since today’s announcement. This implies a capitalization of the company of more than $ 110 billion. After listing, these shares on FTX will be converted into tokens.
Coinbase Leaves About 13,000 Bitcoins Amid Market Drop
According to CryproQuant, approximately 13,000 bitcoins have been withdrawn from the Coinbase crypto exchange amid the negative trend that has dominated the market since the beginning of this week.
As noted by the CEO of CryptoQuant Ki-Young Joo, the coins went into cold storage. Institutional investors have taken advantage of the fall in the price of BTC and built up cryptocurrency reserves. After that, they transferred bitcoins to several offline wallets with a focus on long-term storage.
If you analyze the behavior of these players, you will notice that Bitcoins were purchased at prices below $ 50,000. Institutions were not scared by both the recent rise and fall in the value of BTC.
The funds went from seven different Coinbase Pro wallets. The largest withdrawal was 2768 bitcoins, and the lowest was 579 coins for amounts up to $ 139 million and $ 29 million, respectively.
Ki-Young Ju wrote on Twitter that this behavior of large investors – this is one of the most «bullish» signal, that he had ever noticed.
This is the first time that a massive outflow of cryptocurrency from exchange wallets has been observed at such a high bitcoin price . Previously, similar findings were observed on January 31 and February 5, 2021, when the largest digital currency traded in the range of $ 33,000 to $ 37,000.
On the night of Friday, February 26, the BTC rate fell to $ 49,700, the capitalization of the cryptocurrency is now just over $ 924.687 billion.
