CEO Brian Armstrong insists the move to the public market has been very beneficial.
Coinbase was able to secure $3 million of debt in a single week last year.
Stock of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is down 84% from its all-time high of $381 on the company’s listing day in April 2021, but CEO Brian Armstrong insists the move to the public market has been very beneficial.
Going public “has put us on the main stage, where we’re able to get deals done with BlackRock and companies like Meta,” Armstrong told Messari CEO Ryan Selkis onstage at Messari’s Mainnet conference in New York this past week.
The CEO stated:
“Now we’re the first Fortune 500 company doing crypto, and so we can go do deal with other Fortune 500 companies now, and they treat us more as a more legitimate force out there.”
Well Planned Listing as per Armstrong
Armstrong added that before making the decision to go public with Coinbase, he discussed the advantages and drawbacks with numerous CEOs who had opted to keep their companies private. The opportunity to swiftly obtain financing at reasonable rates is another advantage of being public, according to Armstrong, who noted that Coinbase was able to secure $3 million of debt in a single week last year without him having to attend a single meeting.
Armstrong added:
“I think some of the scrutiny is not that helpful, to be honest. It’s just people pushing their own narrative or trying to do anti-tech bias pieces, [that] should be labeled opinion pieces, but they’re not.”
Even yet, Coinbase has far bigger problems than bad publicity. The SEC filed charges against the exchange for listing unregistered securities after the U.S. Justice Department accused a former employee of insider trading in August.