One of the largest crypto exchanges in the US, Coinbase, announced last week that it’s planning to go public on April 14.
The firm said that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has accepted its S-1 registration statement and it’ll have the ticker symbol of COIN, which is pretty cool.
We’re happy to announce that earlier today, the SEC declared our S-1 registration statement effective and that we expect our direct listing to occur on April 14, 2021, with our Class A common stock trading on the @NASDAQ under the ticker symbol COIN.https://t.co/cwRZWmj9Pv
— Coinbase (@coinbase) April 1, 2021
Coinbase has opted for a direct listing — just like Spotify, Slack, and Asana — instead of hiring a bank to broker the IPO. This means existing investors can sell their shares to new investors. The crypto exchange will disclose a reference trading price a night before it’s listed on the stock exchange.
Initially, the company aimed to go public in March, but it had to postpone its plans as it was undergoing an SEC review. Coinbase also reached a $6.5 million settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where it was facing accusations of reporting false information about its transactions.
The company was founded in 2012, and has more than 43 million users with 34% year-on-year growth. The company registered a profit of $322 million in 2020 with $1.2 billion in revenue, thanks to booming Bitcoin prices.
To date, the firm has raised $547 million through various rounds of funding from noted investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global Management. Bloomberg noted last week, according to figures from Nasdaq’s private market trading, Coinbase was valued at $90 billion.
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