On December 18, 2020, Coinbase, a well-known American crypto company announced that it’s going public and has filed confidentially. Its short blog post did not mention its intention of pursuing a traditional IPO or a direct listing.
While private, the company has raised a lot of capital from investors including Tiger Global, IVP, DFJ Growth and Andreessen Horowitz. The known capital includes over $100 million in August 2017 and $300 million in October 2018.
There’s no clear-cut information about the company’s revenues, nor about its profitability or its operations in these past few years. There has been sparse reporting except about its historical growth. Most of the information is opaque so it is difficult to say whether the crypto company’s public valuation will compare well with its private valuation of $8 billion.
There has been a recent surge in the interest in crypto currencies by investors and companies. Some investors have seen their stock price double in the recent past while others have started investing in it as a reserve asset. So, there is a lot of interest in the timing of Coinbase going public.
In 2020 the company was embroiled in controversy and lost a few dozen employees when its CEO said that the company would not involve itself in political matters that were not directly in line with the company’s mission.
The company is expected to float its IPO in early 2021, maybe in January.
