Crypto’s Last Week
This edition of “Crypto’s Last Week” accounts for the most notable, and crypto-related — institutional, investment, or regulatory — news published between Saturday, February 20, 2021, and Friday, February 26, 2021.
This week’s most covered news was focused on Coinbase and its upcoming public offering. The week began with very positive reports regarding the implied valuation in the Nasdaq private markets, with an implied valuation of $100 billion. This would position the US crypto exchange among the top 100 companies in the world after 9 years of being founded, highlighting the underlying value and the potential virtual asset service providers will have with a more mature market and a larger user base around the world.
Furthermore, the crypto unicorn’s S-1 filing became public by week’s end mesmerizing users, investors, and overall readers around the world. Gaining 1 million monthly transactions when compared to 2019, having 43 million verified users by the end of 2020.
From 2018 to 2020 there has been a remarkable shift in volume from retail to institutional users, which could indicate high expectations for the cryptocurrencies being traded on this platform as well as untapped profits for large investors seeking to diversify portfolios or hedge against inflation.
Additionally, revenue data was also shared indicating a steady rise during 2020 and an estimated 400% increase when comparing Q4 2020 with Q1 2021, which will definitely be an indicator to watch as the company approaches its filing date.
We believe the Coinbase filing will open the door for a large group of crypto unicorns that have been quietly growing and consolidating their market positioning throughout bear markets, and more importantly, the current bull run that has pushed cryptocurrencies to the financial center stage.
Finally, our CEO James Wo predicted that this IPO will be a very important event for the whole crypto space by creating an environment that will promote going public over potential mergers and acquisition proposals coming from large traditional institutions looking to gain market share in what is set to be the future of finance.
Editor’s Note: James Wo is an active investor and the Founder of Digital Finance Group (DFG), a firm that manages investments in excess of $550M. He oversees a digital asset fund that is largely outperforming the market and a VC portfolio that includes Polkadot and its ecosystem projects such as Bifrost, Tidal, Crust, Acala, and more. He’s also managed investments in Brave, LedgerX, Bloq, and Circle. Additionally, James is the Founder and Chairman of Ethereum Classic Labs, the leading supporter of Ethereum Classic (ETC), a public blockchain with a market cap of $1.5B. He is Chairman of Matrix Exchange Ltd., a licensed virtual asset trading platform and custodian regulated by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of the Abu Dhabi Global Market in UAE.
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