Coinbase, the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchanged led by Brian Armstrong, has finally gone public.
The company’s stock, $COIN, debuted on the Nasdaq on Wednesday afternoon at a price of $381, a 52% pop from its $250 reference price. (For comparison to other high-profile direct listings: Slack debuted at 48% higher than its reference price; Palantir 38% higher; and Spotify 26% higher.)
The $381 share price gave the company a debut valuation just a hair under $100 billion. But the stock quickly surged higher, briefly touching a high of $430 per share, which gave it a market cap of $112 billion.
Crucially, today’s direct listing was not an IPO. Where an IPO involves offering up new shares, a direct listing typically sells existing equity without dilution. In Coinbase’s case, it pre-registered 114.9 million existing shares for the listing. This route made sense for a company like Coinbase, which has raised hundreds of millions in venture funding, wanted to avoid the hype and grov
