Continuing a long streak of crypto companies that have gone public, popular trading app Robinhood is the latest digital currency enterprise to announce an IPO (initial public offering). The company is alleging that it will garner as much as $2 billion in new funds from the event it is planning to hold in the next few months, according to a statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Robinhood Is Set for Its Public Debut
Shares will start out at approximately $38 to $42. With the sale, the eight-year-old company is projected to reach a valuation of approximately $32 billion.
This all sounds fine and dandy at first. The trouble is that cryptocurrency – which Robinhood appears to delve heavily into – is suffering as of late, and trading is down for the count. Bitcoin itself has lost more than 50 percent of its overall valuation, with the recent all-time high it struck of $64,000 in mid-April looking as though it was a figment of traders’ imaginations. At the time of writing, the world’s number one digital currency by market cap is trading in the $29,000 range.
Even Robinhood appears to acknowledge the fact that trading has virtually vanished from the spotlight. It even projects its revenue to fall within the next three months according to its SEC filing, so why host this event now? The document reads as follows:
We expect our revenue for the three months ending September 30, 2021, to be lower, as compared to the three months ended June 30, 2021, due to decreased levels of trading activity relative to the record highs in trading activity, particularly in cryptocurrencies, during the three months ended June 30, 2021, and expected seasonality.
This Keeps Happening
The company appears to be taking a page right out of the book of both Coinbase and Circle, with the former company first filing to go public in mid-April at around the moment bitcoin hit its all-time high for the year. Circle was quick to follow suit, saying that it would host an IPO later in the year. CEO and co-founder Jeremy Allaire mentioned:
As we started the year, we had experienced a very dramatic growth in USDC and very strong traction with new products and services that we are launching. Our view is that we were in a rather unique position to rapidly build out and scale out a major franchise built around delivering digital currency-based financial services around the world. It is a unique opportunity to be able to not just raise that amount of capital but transform the company into a company that is accountable to the public.
Robinhood, for the most part, has had a bit of a controversial history with crypto, having put stoppages on all bitcoin and Dogecoin trades early in the year after the company deemed that the prices of both assets were rising too high.
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