As the cryptocurrency mania continues to take hold, it appears that the owners of the exchanges that carry out the daily trades are laughing all the way to the bank. Case in point is San Francisco-based exchange Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), which is now reportedly valued at a staggering $8 billion. That’s a jump of over $6 billion from the $1.7 billion valuation it reported less than a year ago—an incredible increase that demonstrates the power of the crypto boom in late 2017.
The increase in Coinbase’s valuation was revealed during its bid to acquire cryptocurrency networking platform Earn.com. The Earn.com acquisition was worth more than $100 million, and according to a Recode report, the San Francisco startup valued itself at about $8 billion when it offered an equity package to the founders and shareholders of Earn.com. Since the company is not publicly traded, the estimation of $8 billion is a self-made one although it is certainly believable.
However, the valuation of Coinbase at these incredible levels is not only an internal assumption. According to Recode, brokers have been negotiating Coinbase stock at a price that should place the value of the exchange at between $4 and $6 billion. Although that’s a slightly more conservative estimate, it still represents a huge leap in Coinbase’s valuation from less than a year ago.
This increase in valuations has largely been down to the huge boom in cryptocurrency trading over the past few months, although prices are still way back from the all-time highs registered in December. Interestingly, the current value of NASDAQ, which operates the U.S. tech exchange as well as another eight European stock exchanges, has a value of around $15 billion.
This means that Coinbase alone is worth more than half of NASDAQ in just a few months and the numbers can only continue to grow as interest in crypto currencies and Bitcoin continues to increase exponentially. This valuation by VC investors is not new since Binance—the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange—has also seen its valuation soar incredibly over the past months. Binance is not even a year old and has increased its turnover to around $1.7 billion a day by offering a huge slew of cryptocurrencies and trading pairs.
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