In brief
- Coinbase dropped details of its public Nasdaq listing on Thursday.
- The exchange has shares listed on the crypto derivatives trading platform FTX.
- Those shares—which give people the chance to invest ahead of the public listing—are going up in price.
Crypto exchange Coinbase’s pre-IPO shares have continued to rise on private markets following the release of its S-1 regulatory filing on Thursday.
The shares, which trade under the ticker CBSE, were up 2.41% at the time of writing—trading at $395 on crypto derivatives trading platform FTX. About a month ago, a share was worth just $272, so the price has risen 45% in the past month.
But just $71,628-worth of CBSE has been traded in the past 24 hours, according to FTX data.
FTX, the crypto trading platform run by billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, allows people to invest in Coinbase before it goes public on the Nasdaq. To do this, it’s issued a pre-listing futures contract market. Coinbase shares will debut on the Nasdaq in the coming weeks through direct listing.
Right now, there is also a secondary market for Coinbase stock on the Nasdaq Private Market. This means those with vested equity, such as Coinbase employees, can trade shares ahead of the public listing.
It isn’t currently clear how much the private stock is going for—Decrypt asked Nasdaq for the data but hadn’t received a reply by the time this story went live. But The Block last week reported that shares had a settlement price of $373—valuing the firm at $100.3 billion.
There has been a lot of hype around the Coinbase public listing. The price of Bitcoin shot up from $50,447 to a high of $51,982 immediately after Coinbase released the financial details of the listing on Thursday.
The document, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, showed that Coinbase has been doing extraordinarily well: the exchange made a $322 million profit on revenues of over $1.2 billion last year—thanks to the Bitcoin bull run.
Not bad, considering the company posted a $30 million loss just one year before.