Time x is coming. Tomorrow, Wednesday 14 April, the listing of Coinbase, the company that manages the platform that allows you to exchange 32 currencies with three cryptocurrencies: bitcoin, ethereum and litecoin. And it will probably be a historic debut: the goal is to start with a valuation of 100 one hundred billion of round dollars, a result that will make the big banks tremble from their foundations, with JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs in the lead, which will simultaneously announce their accounts for the quarter and which, between Fintech and virtual currencies, are forced to take note of a new and formidable competition.
The Coinbase operation falls at a particularly hot time for the universe of virtual coins. Bitcoin prices have moved on from $27.734 beginning of January at a quotation record $62.668 Tuesday morning with an increase of more than 120%. The price has been steadily above $60 since March 13, the same day President Joe Biden signed the $1.900 trillion tax stimulus bill, fueling fears of a wave of inflation. And in the meantime, the use of cryptocurrencies as a payment instrument has been able to count on an exceptional testimonial, none other than Elon Musk: from now on, said the financier/inventor, bitcoin can be used to buy Tesla.
In this context it is not difficult to foresee a sprint debut for the most important and widespread gateway to the world of cryptocurrencies. Brian Armstrong, the 38-year-old engineer who launched the platform nine years ago, has chosen the path of the direct quotation, without going through the IPO, the solution already adopted first by Spotify and then followed by Palantir, Slack and Roblox.
Direct selling allows a company to list its shares on the stock exchange without issuing new shares, with shorter times than the IPO, lower costs and no dilution of value for current shareholders. For Brian Armstrong, who holds 14,8% of the capital, the landing on the Nasdaq is therefore worth joining the billionaires club. The prize for a winning intuition that tastes like Columbus's egg: Armstrong, who landed on Bitcoin after an unfortunate attempt to develop an electronic wallet, soon realized a weak aspect of cryptocurrencies: the risk of losing the password, necessary to access the personal treasury. The Net is filled with stories of potentially billionaires who have lost their access code. "I think of my mother - he says - I can't even imagine what would happen if I went to her and told her I put your savings in this electronic account, but if you lose the combination, everything goes up in smoke".
A trivial story but which hides a truth: to get out of the circle of nerds and become a mass instrument, the Bitcoin must get out of the "carbonara" and anti-system philosophy, including the cult of secrecy, and adopt characteristics more suited to the large market. Coinbase, therefore, has, albeit with all the warnings, a system for recovering security codes and also has a chest disconnected from the internetwhere cryptocurrencies are stored. In addition to other services, starting with the trading commissions that guarantee a good portion of the platform's revenues where they converge today more or less 50 millions of customers including 7 professional operators including banks, hedges and mutual funds.
A river that grows at an impressive speed: the number of confirmed users rose by 23% between 2018 and 2019 and by another +34% between 2019 and 2020, reaching 43 million in the fourth quarter of 2020. But the The bill then jumped to $56 million at the end of March 2021, the company said. In the face of the traffic boom there is the explosion of assets: From its inception in 2012 to the end of 2020, the value of assets has risen approximately 1,500% to $780 billion. But in the first quarter, thanks to the increase in value of Bitcoin, the bar of one thousand billion was largely exceeded.
And now? Coinbase shares will surely suffer from the same volatility as Bitcoin. Not only. Critics argue that, with entry to the Nasdaq, the promoters of the system will be forced to be less nonchalant about the swaps, loans and other more or less Garibaldian practices that have ensured record profits so far. In the first three months of 2021, the platform earned 800 million dollars on 1,8 billion in turnover. More than double the entire 2020. Large numbers, but constantly evolving also because Armstrong has ambitious intentions: Coinbase, which already operates in 190 countries today, he declared, will be for Bitcoin what Google was for the Internet, i.e. the universal gateway to a new world which, potentially, can reach 3,5 billion people.
