Crypto prices were surging on Wednesday as investors watched for the U.S. hotly anticipated debut of Coinbase Global COIN, later in the session.
Popular crypto asset, dogecoin, which was engineered as a joke back in 2013, was was up more than 127%, outpacing the world’s No. 1 crypto bitcoin, which was up 14% on the day, touching a record near $65,000.
Crypto broker Coinbase will begin trading on the Nasdaq Wednesday under the symbol “COIN” as a direct listing, and it’s seen as a watershed moment in digital assets, which were started back in 2009 with the inception of bitcoin. Coinbase was given a reference price of $250 a share late on Tuesday evening, which values it at over $60 billion and some investors are anticipating that its value could exceed $100 billion on the top end of bullish estimates.
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Coinbase’s listing has helped to fuel the fervor around crypto, highlighted by dogecoin’s Wednesday climb.
Meanwhile, the biggest crypto platform Binance also was seeing its coin surge in private crypto platforms, up more than 50%.
“The Coinbase IPO validates digital assets and also demonstrates the paradigm shift towards digitalization is happening faster than most expected,” wrote Kevin Kang, founding principal of digital-asset hedge fund BKCoin Capital, in emailed comments.
Binance coin boasts a market cap, based on the circulation of its coin, of nearly $88 billion and sees 24-hour volume of around $52 billion, according to CoinMarketcap.com, dwarfing Coinbase Pros 4 billion 24-hour volume.
Dogecoin hit a record at around 14 cents and has returned 2,614% so far in 2021, according to CoinDesk. By comparison, bitcoin prices have climbed 120% so far this year. Ether prices ETHUSD, +1.17%, running on the Ethereum protocol, were up 220% over the past four months.
“Coinbase’s IPO will have a huge affect on the broader crypto market by bringing more attention to the sector, ” Anthony Denier, CEO of Webull, told MarketWatch via email late Thursday.
“It will also give the crypto market one more layer of validation, after the moves into cryptos by large investment banks and companies such as Tesla,” he said, referencing Tesla Inc.’s TSLA, -0.89% $1.5 billion investment in bitcoin.
In more traditional assets, the Dow Jones industrial Averag DJIA, +0.46% and S&P 500 index SPX, +0.11% are both up around 10% on the year and gold GC00, -0.64%, one of the biggest rivals to bitcoin as a store of value, is down over 8%.
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