The American company Coinbase, a platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, announced Thursday that it will take its first steps on the New York Stock Exchange on April 14, under the symbol COIN (coin in French).
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Coinbase's entry to Wall Street on the Nasdaq platform will be a first for a virtual currency company.
As expected, the group will use the direct listing method, and not a traditional IPO, and will therefore not recover any new money.
But the shareholders already present in its capital - the founders, employees and historical investors - will be able to sell their stakes on the market.
This process has already been used by Spotify, Slack, Palantir or Roblox.
A reference price will be provided the night before the operation.
$ 1.14 billion in revenue
The platform was founded in 2012 in San Francisco and provides cryptocurrency buying, selling and portfolio management services.
The group is growing: its turnover soared 136% in 2020 to reach $ 1.14 billion.
And the platform made money last year: $ 322 million after losing $ 30 million in 2019.
Coinbase identified 43 million individual users at the end of 2020. The company then estimated that it had $ 90 billion in assets on its platform, a sum driven by the boom in bitcoin, the price of which quadrupled in 2020 before exploding from the start. of the year.
The prices of other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum or Litecoin have also jumped in recent months.
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