Bitcoin Forum

Starting price of nearly 400USD well above the expectations, values Coinbase above 100B. This is nearly double the indicative price of 250 setout just a week ago. It is obviously not a coincidence that bitcoin has an ATH just a day ago is it?

The listing took place a bit later than expected and at a much higher price. Ticker COIN.

Edited: 100B not 100M. At close it was around 85B.  (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/14/coinbase-to-debut-on-nasdaq-in-direct-listing.html)

Make that a market cap of $100 BILLION, not $100 million. I thought a $100 million looked too low and that would have been a super bargain, so had to do a little bit of research. There will be 261.3 million shares outstanding, multiplied by a (heavily fluctuating) price of $381 per share brings the total to $99.6 billion. It's a really tough call to put a value on it, especially with tech stocks generally being priced so highly right now. It brings in a lot of profit and if it starts to pay that out in dividends or share buybacks, that could make it a worthwhile investment in the long term. I can see lots of big players who might try a takeover if the price drops, but it's a risky competitive market and they'll only be successful if they can keep/grow their market share of customers. They now have an even greater target on their back for hacker extortion, they better not slack for one second on security or it will cripple them.

It's going down quite hard. There seems to be a lot of dumping going on, but I can't tell whether the promoters are involved or not. From what I have heard, the trading opened at $381 per share, and then it climbed to $429.54. At this point Coinbase had a valuation of more than $105 billion. But now it's dropping quite hard. The last time I checked, COIN was trading at $311.60 per share.

https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/coin

Looks to me like there's only 21 million shares outstanding, not 261.3 million (not sure where you got that number from).  I had to check it out on my brokerage account:

https://i.imgur.com/4feig0m.png

Should be interesting to see how the stock performs over the next year or so, and I'll definitely be watching it. 

If you type "how many shares does coinbase have" into Google there seems to be a lot of reporting on the higher 261.3 million shares figure and a $100 billion valuation. As it is an IPO day maybe brokerages are reporting some strange figures - are they only showing those shares which have been given to the 1,700 existing employees and maybe not showing the additional shares in equity that are being sold? Maybe the brokerage is only showing the lot figure that they have been assigned as available to sell? At a supposed $100 million valuation it wouldn't make sense to have 21 million shares outstanding either..

I have to say this really shocked me as well. Coinbase is a real good company I am not arguing with that. If I am not wrong, they could be the biggest crypto company in all of USA and to think that USA is either world leader or at least around there in economy, it is really not a shock to see biggest crypto company in biggest economy to be this highly valued. But I have to be honest, their worth is there, you see their earnings, you see their profits, you see every data, and it tells me it should not worth this much.

It should worth something, but not really this much. Which is why I think it should drop eventually. But the funny thing is, I said the same for Tesla, I said it was priced for future but not now, and eventually they reached that future and became big, now it is valued way higher than it should as well, it keeps getting bigger but price becomes bigger as well.

The IPO was a 'direct listing' meaning that there was no banks promoting the deal. Shares were sold directly on the exchange via the opening trade. It should be no surprise that a bitcoin/cryptocurrency company bypassed the banks.

Literally after going public, they went up from 1.6B in 2016 to 100B today. And this is just the start of their journey in NASDAQ, I know there will be future endeavors that Coinbase can achieve. Although the dumping could mean that they aren't as worth as much as they are valued today, keep in mind that this will change in the coming days as well.

As a publicly-traded stock, I'd say that it's somehow justified given the hype surrounding Coinbase going public. I'm interested in how things would pan out for Coinbase being the first to go public for a cryptocurrency venture although I'm not sure whether I'd want to participate in the trading madness or not. They're a good company in today's standards, though I believe that at the current price of their stocks, it's still too early to invest some money in them as most of these valuation came from hype alone.

Apparently the start of Coinbase's COIN was something "difficult", some also say that it had a little impact on the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency market, on April 14 after Bitcoin reached a new maximum, around 64,890 USD, it had a 5% correction, just like a selloff in altcoins was generated.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-price-drops-to-near-61k-shortly-after-coin-lists-on-nasdaq (https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-price-drops-to-near-61k-shortly-after-coin-lists-on-nasdaq)

It is hardly the first day, it remains to be seen how the week closes, it was a beginning and every beginning is sometimes difficult, investors have more time this time to see and quote at a higher price if everything goes well, it is a matter of expect.

Initial trends indicate that a lot of employees sold their stocks, and that created an oversupply and thereby crashed the prices. Also there was over-expectation regarding the listing. A lot of optimists were saying that a valuation of $150-200 billion could be achieved on the first day of trading. That said, I am not disappointed with the correction with Bitcoin. We are still staying above 60K, and that is a good sign. The next major target should be 100K.

Be careful with investing in coinbase though, I am sure that it is an expensive one but the problem is if they give away a dividend or not because if not then probably you can invest less or more if you want because they are going to grow fast since they don't give dividends.

The price already jumped more than 30% in trading and is still strong above 300$. I kind of expected the price to drop directly after the IPO, but it looks like there is still plenty of demand. I am also going to be careful with trading the stock. In my opinion is the stock price be closely related to the crypto market - when crypto coins are strong then the stock price will be high, and  if we see a bust in the coin market than also the stock price will be lower. It might be easier to directly invest in coins and make a higher profit.

Now that Coinbase has been valued at double digit billions, we have to wait and see what investors like Warren Buffett have to say about it.

They have always shied away from accepting Bitcoin's value due question the underlying fundamentals. Coinbase with its 56 Million customers should give them some reason to derive a valuation. If the stories of the Dot com unicorns and their stock appreciations are anything to go by, Coinbase can be one of the best long term investments.

I dont think there will be a problem in them growing their customer base,
there are a lot of future Bitcoiners still to come in yet who will transfer a lot
of wealth to Bitcoin.

There are those who believe in Bitcoin and will want to broaden their
portfolio with Coinbase shares, and there are others who have no interest
in owning Bitcoin but see an early investment opportunity in another Tech company.

There are people who will view this the same way as investing in Amazon or Apple
at the early stages.

Maybe veteran investors like Warren Buffet have ethics or principles in investing, such as only investing in something that has strong intrinsic value? or they hold their own investment fundamentals, cmiiw. btw, now wallstreetbets (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-15/wallstreetbets-bows-to-crypto-wave-allows-bitcoin-discussion (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-15/wallstreetbets-bows-to-crypto-wave-allows-bitcoin-discussion)) have also started with crypto discussions such as btc, doge and other top coins. I think listing Coinbase on the Nasdaq will make the process of adopting crypto as a mainstream investment even faster.

NASDAQ is for big companies like google. Coinbase is sure considered as one for having 100B cap and yes it's no surprise that BTC had also pumped up to $64K just yesterday. Binance had also announced to list the $COIN of coinbase. Does anyone have an idea of the use case of the $COIN?

With Coinbase becoming mainstream, the discussion I've heard with Raoul Pal was that it opens a whole new world for crypto markets that investors are not calling Altcoins an ALTCOIN anymore but "digital assets"!   

LOL.. I don't expect any change in the stance from Warren Buffet. He has become more and more grumpy with his age and he still can't fathom the fact that an innovation that he derided earlier has now reached a market cap of $2 trillion plus. His recent statements also confirm that his stance is unchanged. That said, I need to ask you why you guys are so desperate to get the attention from this guy. IMO, we don't need his certificate or endorsement.

That is impressive for them to grow that fast, I envy those lucky people who are going to buy Coinbase stocks right now because now that they are the only one crypto stock in the market right now, I am sure that they are going to see an exponential growth overtime.

Lol! You are right. Other than that, Buffett has underperformed the S&P 500 over the last 15 years or so. He missed the big tech bandwagon and only a few years ago bought Apple. He got rich in a different world. He is not the best person to analyze well what is going on in the crytpo world.

I started to think that many bitcoin to fiat trading platforms are using their bitcoin reserves and active traders to achieve capital gains than what they want to achieve from trading fees and others.
The positive point is that it means more legislation and oversight on cryptocurrency market, allowing it to grow in a healthy way.

Binance turned into a tool to keep track of hot news and money to make profits from it. I don't want to be pessimistic, but I hope this doesn't end in a negative way.

I would expect warren buffet to be he last person in earth that's gonna praise any crypto based company like coinbase, heck I even thinking that he just won't be trying out crypto investment like at all, he just doesn't really good at making investment when it comes to tech based companies let alone investing into crypto based company that makes people's head gonna explode just learning the technical. Let the old man drinks his lovely coke and enjoy his belief I guess.


exactly, warren buffet ain't elon musk of investment. there's far better insightful investors out there why always limit ourselves to warren buffet lol. doesnt make sense.

Warren Buffet had astounding success in stock investment. But that was three decades back. His tactics no longer work under changed circumstances. His hatred towards Bitcoin stems from the fact that it became insanely successful despite him trying to deride it. He just can't come to terms and admit that he made a mistake with cryptocurrency. I don't have a problem with Buffet as such. Everyone is free to have their own opinion about cryptocurrency. But I do have a problem with some of the Bitcoiners, who try to give more importance to Buffet than he deserves.

I don't believe $COIN has a use case. It's a Stock Token.

https://www.binance.com/en/support/faq/1f4b8036e43049baa612ba3c2dc07f16

And slowly we're starting to switch from banks to banks...

I understand how Coinbase helped the growth of bitcoin by allowing buyers to get coins easily, but why should a centralized company that basically acts like a bitcoin bank have any future when we were supposed to completely avoid those? I wouldn't have like their listing to fail and I wouldn't like to see the stock plummeting as for now it might hurt BTC too but I feel like every pace right now takes us further and further away from that freedom bitcoin was supposed to give.

As for the stock price itself, I wouldn't be that concerned for the first days and even months even if drops 250 or 200.
I remember the panic headlines from Facebook, dropped 50% below $20, it's the end of Facebook, and look at it now!

Do not consider it as a "crypto" company, think of it like a stock broker. Warren Buffet always said he had his hesitance towards crypto because he is a person who buys into the instrinct value of a stock, dude is a machine without emotions when making a decision, think about it this way he has been friends with Bill Gates for over 20 years I think and he goes to many places with him, has fun with him and basically spends so much time with him but he has never owned one share of Microsoft whereas he bought Apple shares recently because he believed it would go up, dude is seriously without emotions.

In coinbase things are a bit different than buying bitcoin, because bitcoin doesn't have an instrinct value, whereas Coinbase does, it is a company, it has customers, over 50 million of them, and they make money from each buy/sell and these are all financial data, if he likes the price he could buy that, but I believe after reaching 90+ years old, he may not be really caring about things as much as he used to.

Definitely agree with you here. Buffett is already in his final stage of life. Even if he doesn't care about crypto or any other new advances in technology, he can still live his life to the fullest. Money is not everything. He can always let go of the current trends and just take care of his own business. He should be retiring from all these business stuffs and just enjoy life. Let the new generation deal with what is happening in this digital space.
But on the other note, the price per share of Coinbase is really impressive. The target of $250 per share last week jumped up fast. Wonder if it will go $500 by the end of the month.

Its Coinbase's value as a company and it has nothing to do with bitcoin / crypto. People buy Coinbase's stock hoping the value of the company would take off because it is a company that deals with crypto in particular and crypto is the hot stuff right now


That 'freedom' isnt alligned with the current world idealism but if you look at the larger picture, Coinbase made it to NASDAQ. 5 years ago no one would really think that this would happen but yeah I dont think its going to affect bitcoin / crypto that much

Well.. this is surprising.. actually I was expecting a valuation of >$100 billion and a share price of at least $500. But the listing was a huge disappointment and COIN (despite its impressive trade volumes) started going down almost immediately after it started trading. If I am not wrong, the high of around $430 per share was achieved in the initial half an hour or so. But then the prices crashed by around 25%-30%. For me, it was very disappointing.

You said it yourself. Coinbase is a company that holds, sells and markets cryptocurrencies. There whole success is built on top of Bitcoin's success and marketing efforts towards convincing people to invest in cryptocurrencies. They, in turn, derive fees from the users actions. The correct classification for coinbase would probably be that they are a service provider and not really a crypto company themselves. When companies giving crypto services become valuable, then that value is accrued from the value of cryptocurrencies themselves.

A lot of people said above, and i agree, that Bitcoiners shouldn't be concerned what Buffett thinks about it. That was a rhetoric statement as to what stance would nocoiners take in the face of this valuation, if it sustains and grows in the long term. The traditional nocoiners always give the argument of "no intrinsic value". What i meant with WB's example was, would they be willing to put more of an effort and try to "understand" the value rather than try to brush it aside? That was the point and it doesn't really needs pontifications about how Warren Buffet matters or doesn't matter to Bitcoin.. ::)

Of course, coinbase isn't the first crypto company on NASDAQ. Still, its the first one with a huge user base and a large presence within the US mainland. This quote from an NYT article sums (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/business/coinbase-ipo-stock.html) up what coinbase listing implies for nocoiners and normies out there:

Maybe we need to temper our expectations from Bitcoin. A company like Coinbase brings users onboard through marketing and hand-holding. It gives a lot of people the assurance they need before jumping into the unknown. A percentage of those users will surely slowly gain access to the understanding of private keys. With the incessant media attention, this point was always going to come for Bitcoin.

Maybe what you want is for the Binance plan to come to fruition like you highlighted in one of your own posts i replied to here. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5329291.msg56785458#msg56785458)