Contradicting a report from CNBC Africa’s Ran NeuNer, a top Coinbase executive said that the cryptocurrency industry giant will not go public anytime soon.
Speaking with Bloomberg, Coinbase President & COO Asiff Hirji shot down rumors that the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange, brokerage, and custodian is preparing to list its shares on a public exchange within the near future.
“There’s not going to be an IPO any time soon. We have so much to do. At some point, yes, we will go public, but that’s not even close to the top of the list of things we’re worried about right now.”
Such rumors have long circulated, but they grew louder last week when Ran NeuNer, the host of Crypto Trader, tweeted out that he would be exclusively revealing the details of Coinbase’s plans to hold an initial public offering (IPO), a long-anticipated event within cryptocurrency circles. However, when the show finally aired, he referred to it as a pre-IPO funding round, one that Coinbase formally announced on Tuesday.
As CCN reported, that Series E funding round saw Coinbase raise $300 million at an $8 billion valuation from investors including Tiger Global Management and Andreessen Horowitz.
Hirji, who said that the funding round was “opportunistic” rather than necessary, explained that Coinbase is currently focused on diversifying its revenue streams since the firm’s fee structure is currently “100 percent transactional.”
Even so, Coinbase intends to remain a “crypto-first” company, as evidenced by the fact that the company recently revised its cryptocurrency listing framework to allow the heretofore-exclusive platform to enable support for hundreds, potentially thousands of cryptoassets in the coming months and years.
“There are somewhere between two and three thousand cryptocurrencies out there. Let’s assume that 90 percent of them are garbage. That still means that 10 percent — there’s somewhere between two and three hundred that are legitimately worth investing in, legitimately worth taking part in. We offer seven” Hirji said. “So you should expect us to go from seven to that total number that we think is worth it, over the next year or so,” with some assets being added in the US and more being added in other regions that have more favorable regulatory frameworks.
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