Depending on who you talk to, you will probably find two very different attitudes when it comes to Coinbase. While some people absolutely love the ease with which Coinbase allowed them to enter the crypto world, there are others who abhor the high fees and other hoops that Coinbase makes you jump through just to accomplish simple tasks.
Depending on when you catch them, you might find all of those opinions above from a single person. I am one of those people. Like many others, Coinbase was my entrance into cryptocurrency. Back in 2017 I had signed up for a Steem account, but not receiving any kind of feedback from them I gave up and assumed the account creation request link was broken.
There were far less options back in 2017 than there are today, but even then, Coinbase was one of the largest and most well known.
I created an account, and before long I was the proud "owner" of one or two Litecoin and a fraction of some Ethereum. BTC was sitting around $7000 and seemed well out of reach for me at the time. Pretty funny huh?
Love them or hate them, there are a lot of things that Coinbase does right. On top of that, they do it in a way so that the government pretty much lets them get away with it. Sure, there have been a couple of times that they were in the spotlight for this or that, but for the most part those instances have just faded into the background.
While the majority of media outlets treat anything crypto about as bad as they did Trump (I lean left but I do admit they were harsh at times), Coinbase seems to be the darling that can almost do no wrong.
Which leads me to their not so recent announcement about going public with a direct stock sale. No IPO, they are simply going to offer their stock directly through NASDAQ from what I understand.
So here I am in the middle of a conundrum. Part of me really wants to pick up some of their stock when it goes on sale. Unfortunately, the numbers I have seen (thanks Google and Leo Discord) for the starting price are right around $200 per share. At that cost, I am going to be lucky to pick up maybe two shares with the investable money I have available.
At that point I have to wonder if it is even worth it?
Then I think about the two shares of Apple that I purchased many many years ago. The two shares which are now 112 shares through a series of beneficial stock splits. Additionally, I have to take into account he overall landscape of crypto at the moment. More and more people are getting interested. That means more and more people are going to be looking for a way to buy.
As much as we would like them to, not everyone is going to onboard to Leo through Twitter. Some are simply going to want to purchase a little BTC, LTC, ETH, or whatever other coins Coinbase eventually ends up listing. At least on the US side, I can see the number of accounts created on Coinbase growing exponentially over the next one to three years.
That is definitely something to be excited about if you are a stock holder. Especially when you consider those high fees that we were talking about earlier.
Will you be investing in Coinbase stock when it becomes available? Is that ~$200 price point too high for you, or do you feel at $200 it is over valued? Is it even worth it if you can only purchase one or two shares? Let's discuss it in the comments.
