On April 14, Coinbase’s direct listing on Nasdaq took place. The opening price stood at $381.
At the start of trading, COIN traded up to $429.54. The exchange’s market capitalisation surpassed $100 billion, making it the most highly capitalised exchange in the world — larger than the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq itself.
Trading closed at $328.28 (−13.9% from the open). The session’s low was $310, the high — $429.54. Market capitalisation fell to around $85.7 billion.
On the eve of listing, Nasdaq set Coinbase’s reference price at $250, implying a market capitalisation of $66 billion. On FTX, traders valued COIN at more than $620.
“When we started Coinbase in 2012, Bitcoin was $6. Almost no one, except internet nerds, knew anything about it. Bitcoin was a crazy idea that involved creating digital money for everyone,” wrote co‑founder Fred Ehrsam.
On listing day, Bitcoin surpassed $64,000, and the total market capitalisation was $2.3 trillion.
“This is still the beginning. 1% of the most important technology of the coming decades. Cryptocurrencies will change money and information, and the world rests on them.”
Coinbase immortalised its listing in the Bitcoin blockchain. The mining pool F2Pool included in block #679187 the headline of The New York Times article “House Gives Final Approval to Biden’s $1.9T Pandemic Relief Bill Mine” from March 10, 2021. This is a nod to the genesis block.
And this is how Coinbase was welcomed on Nasdaq. The countdown began at 21 seconds, a nod to 21 million bitcoins.
Trading of COIN tokenised shares will be available on Binance and is already available on FTX in the form of contracts. The latter converts COIN/USDT futures into tokenised shares after the first trading session.
Binance postponed the listing of COIN indefinitely due to market volatility. Trading opened only a day later — April 15.
In the run-up to the event, each of Coinbase’s 1,700 full-time employees received 100 shares as a gift. The community has already calculated that this is significantly more than the exchange had ever allocated to Bitcoin developers in grants.
Imagining a $25M bitcoin dev fund
— Jeremy Ruⓑin (@JeremyRubin) April 14, 2021
Read more about Coinbase’s business and prospects in our feature.
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