Today it broke that COINBASE was going to push back their IPO on the Nasdaq and were paying a $6.5 million fine to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or CFTC for short. With Coinbase being the biggest crypto name to go public a natural question to ask is how is this going to affect its share price going public. The long and short of it though is that it will not.
Coinbase is going public via a direct listing. This is not a very common way of going public because it does not raise any money for the company and allows the current shareholders to be able to sell their shares immediately. This is the same path that Spotify for instance took and runs counter to the idea of raising huge capital during an IPO.
While the pricing of course will be a huge thing crypto is becoming how electrics cars were earlier this year or cannabis stocks were a couple of years ago. People and traders cannot get enough of them so as soon as they are listed the prices are going to be high. With this settlement with the CFTC through Coinbase did not have to admit guilt it also was not able to deny the charges.
The charges dealt with the platform that has now been renamed to Coinbase Pro and wash sales/inflated trading volume. This is not surprising to see because of the nature of the cryptosphere at that point in time and how regulation has changed. Also with how crazy prices are across the board with exchanges back then prices were really hard to track. Chainlink and Band Protocol address these issues to help provide clarity that was not here in 2016-2018.
Overall though this should not affect the company really at all. It was a minor stumbling block but one tons of companies run into from Google to Apple to Tesla in the world!
