As a result, we will be the first public company to own Ethereum, verified stakes, tokens (decentralized finance), and many other crypto assets,” said Haas CFO.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said Thursday that the largest U.S. digital exchange has received board approval to add $500 million to its balance sheet.
Coinbase tweeted that 10% of all revenue would go to Cryptocurrencies, the platform’s co-founder and CEO.
Coinbase CFO Alethia Haas blogs on Armstrong’s comments on Thursday.
“We believe in the cryptocurrency economy, an economy in which transactions such as buying, selling, spending, and income depend on the future of digital assets,” she said.
“This means we will be the first publicly traded company other than Bitcoin to own ether, proof-of-stake, tokens (decentralized finance), and many other crypto assets to support our trading platform,” Haas said.
As of December 30, the base currency of Coinbase COIN + 1.58% is $48.9 million, which should be pegged to US dollars on the balance sheet.
Bitcoin BTCUSD is valued at 1.17% ($130.1 million) and is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap Ether ETHUSD. 2.25%, a value of $23.8 million.
According to public records, it has $34 million in assets in other cryptocurrencies.
MicroStrategy (MSTR, +3.24%) has more than $5 billion in Bitcoin, and Tesla (TSLA, -2.25%) has nearly $2 billion in Bitcoin. These are the two largest publicly traded companies that already have digital assets on their balance sheets.
This trend is expected to continue through 2021. GLXY, +2.08% BRPHF, +0.65 Galaxy Digital Holdings GLXY, +2.08% BRPHF, +0.65% contains more than $800 million in Bitcoin.
Coinbase recently announced a $4 billion cash reserve in preparation for further investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Gary Gensler and others.
The exchange launched at a similar price of $250 before the first trading session at Nasdaq +0.11% in mid-April and closed at $342 on April 16th.
The fact that Coinbase went public is more direct than the initial public offering. This means that the company is not raising money while judging the stock price increase on the first day without the existing subscription price through the IPO process.
Coinbase generated $2 billion in net income in the second quarter, up from $178 million in the same quarter a year earlier and $1.6 billion in the first quarter.
About half of the company’s revenue still comes from Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions. Both volatility assets fell from their spring highs. But digital assets are struggling to recover. The size of the cryptocurrency market is estimated at $2 billion for the first time since May.
The Ethereum network has gone through several updates. This involves changing the proof-of-work protocol to proof-of-stake. More storage and processing power for smart contracts. This led to an increase in the ether price.