Retail Investors Flock to Coinbase While It’s Preparing For a Direct Listing

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Sead Fadilpašić

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Sead Fadilpašić

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Sead specializes in writing factual and informative articles to help the public navigate the ever-changing world of crypto. He has extensive experience in the blockchain industry, where he has served...

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June 26, 2023 06:54 EDT

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As popular trading platform Robinhood run into troubles, retail investors who are looking for new ways to trade, seem to have set their eyes on the US-based crypto exchange Coinbase, while the company is preparing for a direct listing.

There is now a reason to believe that we are seeing retail investors coming into the crypto space, specifically in the US. Coinbase ranks 11th on the US App Store today – up 45 places since yesterday, per the Block data.

Furthermore, it ranks 4th today among the top free iOS Apple Store apps in the US. It’s behind Robinhood, Webull, and Reddit, and it precedes TikTok, Cash App, Zoom, and Fidelity Investments on the top 10 list, as well as its competitor Binance which is sitting on the 21st spot. Coinbase is also 51st on Google Play in the US.

Per Google Trends, search interest in Coinbase has also increased.

Meanwhile, in a January 28 statement, Coinbase announced that it intends to become a publicly-traded company by way of a direct listing of its Class A common stock.

Unlike the traditional initial public offering (IPO), in a direct listing, the company sells shares directly to the public without getting help from intermediaries. Quite a few companies have been choosing this route in the past several years, including Spotify, Slack, Asana, Palantir, and others.

After rumors of its potential IPO started spreading past summer, the exchange said just last month that it confidentially filed a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which they said back then and repeated now was expected to become effective after the SEC completes its review process, “subject to market and other conditions.” Not much information was given beyond that, while CNBC estimated at the time that the quickest timeline it could possibly go public is Q1 2021.

Coinbase was valued at USD 8bn following a mega funding round in 2018, but both it and the whole crypto market have grown vastly since then. Crypto researcher Messari value Coinbase at USD 28bn. Meanwhile, as reported, major investment firm Blockchain Capital estimated that in 2021 Coinbase would debut as the first IPO in crypto and that its market capitalization would surpass USD 30bn.

Coinbase claims it has over USD 90bn in assets on platform and over 43m registered users.
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