The price of bitcoin increasing tenfold over the course of the last year has caught the market by surprise, with banks and institutions now scrambling to get a piece of the action.
Investors in Coinbase’s early fundraisings, a close-knit group of Silicon Valley investment firms and early crypto believers, have increased their investments by 100-fold in some cases. The windfall could spread much further, however: The endowment fund of Duke University will be a beneficiary of Coinbase’s public listing, CoinDesk reported last week
Coinbase is a cryptocurrency exchange that helps one buy and ‘hodl’ cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin among others, and will be soon coming out with its public offer of shares. ‘Hodl’ is a term used in the crypto community for holding a crypto asset through ups and downs, rather than selling it.
Founded by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ersham in 2012, Coinbase is a decentralized company that powers the crypto economy. Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world by leveraging the power of digital assets built using blockchain technology. The platform now has over 43 million users worldwide and has transacted more than $456 billion to date, according to the company’s latest filing with the SEC.
While the jury is still out on whether the cryptos will come into the mainstream or remain a speculative asset, the company is increasing the dissemination of information as far as the interest of investing community is concerned.
The platform enables approximately 43 million retail users, 7,000 institutions, and 115,000 ecosystem partners in over 100 countries to participate in the crypto economy. As of December 31, 2020, the total value of trade was over $456 billion on the platform since inception and had stored over $90 billion worth of assets across their platform. Since inception through December 31, 2020, the company had generated over $3.4 billion in total revenue, largely from transaction fees that they earn from volume-based trades on the platform by retail users and institutions. In 2020, Coinbase had generated more than $1.3 billion in revenue, more than double the $534 million earned in 2019.
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