It’s official: Coinbase is going public.
The San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange announced Thursday that it has confidentially filed for a direct listing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The move comes as bitcoin, ethereum and other digital tokens have soared in value over the past year, drawing mainstream attention to the little-regulated industry.
Founded in 2012, Coinbase allows users to buy, sell, store and trade cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, ethereum and litecoin. It also offers an institutional trading platform, Coinbase Pro, and a custody service for large investors.
The company has more than 35 million verified users in over 190 countries.
“Today marks an important milestone for Coinbase as we aspire to create an open financial system for the world,” Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, said in a blog post. “As a first step on that journey, we have confidentially submitted our draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
Coinbase did not say when it plans to go public or how much it hopes to raise in its listing. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the company was aiming to list on NAsdaq in March at a valuation of around $60 billion to $65 billion.
That would make it one of the biggest tech IPOs since Facebook’s debut in 2012.
Investors have poured billions of dollars into cryptocurrency startUPS like Coinbase in recent years as the prices of digital tokens have soared. Bitcoin, which was worth less than $1,000 at the beginning of 2017, topped $50,000 earlier this month before falling back below $45,000.
Ethereum has also seen big gains, rising from around $8 in January 2017 to more than $1,400 now.
The surge in crypto prices has led to a boom in trading activity on Coinbase and other exchanges. The company said Thursday that its revenue more than doubled to $1.
8 billion in 2020 while its net income rose nine-fold to $322 million. It added that its trading volume hit a record $335 billion last month.
Despite the recent pullback in prices, crypto remains a highly volatile asset class and some investors remain wary of putting their money into it. Regulatory concerns have also weighed on the industry, with government agencies around the world struggling to figure out how to deal with digital currencies.
In 2018, for example, the SEC rejected several proposals for bitcoin exchange-traded funds amid concerns about fraud and manipulation. More recently, China has cracked down on crypto trading while U.
S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called bitcoin “extremely inefficient” and warned that it could be used for illicit activity.
Still, there appears to be growing interest among institutional investors in getting exposure to digital assets through investment vehicles like exchanges and ETFs. In December, for example, asset manager BlackRock filed paperwork with the SEC indicating that it was considering adding bitcoin futures to two of its funds.
And earlier this month, Tesla disclosed that it had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin and planned to start accepting the token as payment for its cars.
Coinbase’s public listing will give more mainstream investors a chance to bet on the future of cryptocurrency without having to buy digital tokens directly. It could also help legitimize an industry that has long been viewed with suspicion by many in the traditional financial world.