From Yahoo Finance:
....MUCH MORECoinbase Global (COIN) opened for trading at $381 per share on Wednesday, with the exchange platform hitting the public markets amid a record-setting rally in cryptocurrency prices and broadening adoption of digital assets.
The price of Coinbase's first trade gave the stock a fully diluted valuation of about $99.5 billion and marked a jump of 52.4% over its reference price of $250 per share on the Nasdaq. Shares extended advances to top $429 per share in the minutes following the debut, before paring some gains. Coinbase's direct listing differed from a traditional initial public offering in that no new shares were issued in the process, with existing shareholders instead directly selling the stock to the public.
The public debut was one of the most highly anticipated in the U.S. this year, with public and institutional interest in cryptocurrencies swelling in recent months. Companies including Tesla (TSLA), Square (SQ), BNY Mellon (BNY) and PayPal (PYPL) have either added significant holdings of bitcoin to their balance sheets or begun facilitating transactions in cryptocurrencies, and legacy banks Morgan Stanley (MS) and Goldman Sachs (GS) recently announced they would begin offering bitcoin exposure to their wealth management clients.
"Coinbase is a foundational piece of the crypto ecosystem and is a barometer for the growing mainstream adoption of bitcoin and crypto for the coming years in our opinion," Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note. "Given the still nascent and volatile nature around Bitcoin we believe less than 5% of public companies will head down the Bitcoin investment path in some capacity over the next 12 to 18 months, but could move markedly higher as more regulation and acceptance of this currency takes hold further down the road."
Bitcoin prices reached a record high of more than $64,000 on Wednesday, and comprise most of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization of over $2 trillion. The boom in demand for digitally native, non-interchangeable assets has been further underscored by the rise in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the digital art and collectibles world, most of which have been built on the ethereum blockchain."Crypto has the potential to be as revolutionary and widely adopted as the internet. The unique properties of crypto assets naturally position them as digital alternatives to store of value analogs such as gold, enable the creation of an internet-based financial system, and provide a development platform for applications that are unimaginable today," Coinbase said in its prospectus. "These markets and asset classes collectively represent hundreds of trillions of dollars of value today." ....
Yesterday:
"Coinbase gets reference price of $250 per share from Nasdaq ahead of Wednesday’s direct listing"
