Coinbase Shares Open at $381 a Share on First Day of Trading

Wednesday was one of the most anticipated days in the cryptocurrency arena as Coinbase made its debut on Wall Street.

Trading under the ticker symbol COIN on the NASDAQ, Coinbase made its opening debut at $381 a share. The company’s first trade gave the stock a fully diluted valuation of about $99.5 billion and represented an increase of 52.4% over its reference price of $250 per share.
Shares extended advances to even over $429 per share in the minutes following the debut but had pulled back some.

Coinbase did not go through a traditional inital public offering but through a direct listing. No new shares were issued in the process, with existing shareholders instead directly selling the stock to the public.

“Coinbase is a foundational piece of the crypto ecosystem and is a barometer for the growing mainstream adoption of bitcoin and crypto for the coming years in our opinion,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives remarked.

“Given the still nascent and volatile nature around Bitcoin we believe less than 5% of public companies will head down the Bitcoin investment path in some capacity over the next 12 to 18 months, but could move markedly higher as more regulation and acceptance of this currency takes hold further down the road,” Ives added.

Bitcoin prices reached a record high of more than $64,000 on Wednesday as well.

“Crypto has the potential to be as revolutionary and widely adopted as the internet. The unique properties of crypto assets naturally position them as digital alternatives to store of value analogs such as gold, enable the creation of an internet-based financial system, and provide a development platform for applications that are unimaginable today,” Coinbase said in its prospectus.

“These markets and asset classes collectively represent hundreds of trillions of dollars of value today.”

The company, which makes a lot of its money via transaction fees from trades on its platform by retail and institutional users, reported revenue for the year ended Dec. 31 of $1.3 billion.

Coinbase passed the $100 billion mark during intraday trading on Wednesday.

“Really to be comfortable buying at this price, you really have to have a strong belief, firm conviction, that cryptocurrency is the way of the future and that it’s going to be a long-term, sustainable trend,” Bankrate.com’s Jim Royal told Yahoo Finance. “But of course, you’re also betting on, at least to some extent, the continued rise in price of major cryptos such as bitcoin [and] ethereum raising increased trading volume … And so those are really key drivers to the success of Coinbase.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.