Coinbase was founded in 2012 and is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the USA
Photograph:
Michael Short / Bloomberg News
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global Inc. said on Thursday that it plans to go public through a direct listing, making the popular platform the latest company to forgo the traditional public offering process.
The company said last month that it had filed a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a public offering.
Direct listings differ from traditional initial public offerings in that companies place their shares directly on the stock market. Companies are able to save money that, in a more traditional IPO, would be disbursed to investment banks. This option to go public is not as common as traditional IPOs.
Palantir Technologies, data mining company Inc.
PLTR -8.56%
and streaming platform Spotify Technology SA
PLACE -1.44%
both were made public through direct listings.
Coinbase was founded in 2012 and is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the USA. The San Francisco-based company was recently valued at about $ 8 billion and has more users than Charles Schwab Body
SCHW 0.84%
platform.
One of the company’s goals was to make bitcoin accessible to a broader group of people. The platform also acts as custodian of users’ assets.
The price of bitcoin is skyrocketing, driving a wave of trading that has pushed its value higher than ever. WSJ explains how bitcoin trading works and why the volatile digital currency is reaching historic levels. Illustration: Jacob Reynolds / WSJ
—Paul Vigna contributed to this article.
Write to Allison Prang at [email protected]
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