(April 15) Coinbase gained about 10% in premarket trading.
Coinbase Global popped nearly 72% intraday Wednesday and ended the session ahead more than 30% after the cryptocurrency firmstaged its eagerly anticipated direct listing on the Nasdaq.
COIN opened at $381 at about 1:30 p.m. ET, up 52.4% from a$250-a-share reference pricethat the Nasdaq and Goldman Sachs had set for the stock Tuesday afternoon.
Coinbase later shot up to as high as $429.54 intraday before closing at $328.28, up 31.3% from the reference price.
The closing price gives Coinbase about an $85.8B market capitalization, as the company has some 261.3M shares outstandingon a fully diluted basis.
In addition, ARK Invest buys Coinbase for 3 funds. Cathie Wood bought 89,589 shares of Coinbase for the ARK Fintech Innovation ETF (NYSEARCA:ARKF). She bought 512,535 shares of the crypto trading platform for the flagship ARK Innovation ETF (NYSEARCA:ARKK). And she added 147,081 Coinbase shares to the ARK Next Generation Internet ETF (NYSEARCA:ARKW).
That was about $246M worth of Coinbase shares.
"There are going to be great opportunities from now and five years to buy (Coinbase) on dips," Wood told Bloomberg.
ARK thinks institutional interest could add $500K to the price of Bitcoin (BTC-USD).
Wall Street has been excitedly awaiting the company's go-public move because the firm represents perhaps the first pure play on the hot cryptocurrency market.
Coinbase operates a popular trading platform for Bitcoin (BTC-USD) and other cryptocurrencies, and also offers services like hosting the digital “wallets” that store investors’ crypto holdings.
COIN went public at a time when Bitcoin has been trading at or near record highs, as have other cryptoslike Ethereum (ETH-USD) and Dogecoin (DOGE-USD).
However, the company took the unusual move of going public via a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO. Certain Coinbase pre-IPO investors simply made as many as 114.85M shares available to the public via the Nasdaq.
That led to uncertainty as to how much COIN shares are really worth. In a traditional initial public offering, underwriters set the IPO’s official price hours before the stock hits the market, selling shares to institutional investors and wealthy investors at that level.
Although a stock can open higher or lower than the official IPO price, at least that gives some investors an idea of what the shares should be worth. That’s not the case with direct listings.
That said, not only did the Nasdaq and Goldman issue their $250-a-share reference price Tuesday, but German crypto exchange FTX had been offering non-U.S. investors a futures contract that imputed the stock’s likely price ahead of official trading.
The FTX contract was trading at $463.845 right around the time that Coinbase stock opened for actual trading. As each contract represents 1/250-millionth of Coinbase’s estimated value, that implied a $116B market cap for the company.
Dividing that by Coinbase’s 261.3M fully diluted shares outstanding put COIN shares’ estimated value at about $443.79 apiece right around the stock’s official Nasdaq opening.
Coinbase's hot IPO immediately made it one of the most valuable financial companies, right up withMorgan Stanley, Charles Schwab and others.