The Coinbase IPO Will Make Brian Armstrong Quite Rich

The Coinbase IPO will see Brian Armstrong making billions of dollars from the listing as he was the one who penned the letter to the SEC with the S1 filing. Last week, the exchange made its filing to the SEC as we can see more in today’s Coinbase news.

The crypto community will gain massively as a result of the firm going public but the biggest winner will be the CEO of the company Brian Armstrong who will gain billions from the Coinbase IPO. Armstrong penned a letter to the SEC outlining how the industry has evolved from only trading to something more important:

 “Trading and speculation were the first major use cases to take off in cryptocurrency, just like people rushed to buy domain names in the early days of the internet. But we’re now seeing cryptocurrency evolve into something much more important.”

The developing use case for the crypto is reflected in the growing fortunes of both Armstrong and Coinbase as in late 2018 at the height of the crypto winter as Forbes put an $8 billion valuation on the company and estimated the CEO’s stake to be worth $1.3 billion. The current valuations for the company are set between $77 billion and $100 billion and taking the 21% holding of Armstrong’s stocks at the upper of the company’s valuation will give him a net worth of $20 billion. There’s still a distance from Bezos’ fortune of $181 billion but still enough for Brian to make it to the Forbes rich list at number 93.

Bitcoin peaked at $58K last week which was followed by a market-wide dip that leads to the loss of $389 billion from the total market cap but the bull trend remains intact and reminds us of the volatility in the crypto space still. However, the company listed a few factors that have the potential to negatively impact ETH and BTC as their two biggest markets are driving 56 percent of the trading volume on the exchange. Among the factors listed were the hacks, splits, developments in quantum computing, as well as regulation but Armstrong, responded by saying that he remains optimistic about the long-term future of the cryptocurrency:

 “You can expect volatility in our financials, given the price cycles of the cryptocurrency industry. This doesn’t faze us, because we’ve always taken a long-term perspective on crypto adoption.”