• Olaf Carlson-Wee, the first employee at Coinbase has revealed that Coinbase should have gone public through the crypto path.
• He further added that the now declining shares would be more than double now if they went public using the USDC-style model.

Olaf Carlson-Wee is widely known for his role as the founder and CEO of Polychain Capital, but he is also the former Head of Risk at Coinbase and was the first employee of the exchange. As one of the pioneers, he got a lot of shares and has had access to behind-the-scenes action over the recent Coinbase listing. At the Ethereal Virtual Summit, Carlson-Wee shared his view on the whole process. He revealed that he would have preferred if Coinbase went public the crypto way.

Carlson-wee added that Coinbase should have gone public on the Ethereum blockchain, ‘using the USDC-style model, through which the company’s shares would be represented as ERC-20 tokens’. With billions of dollars being poured into the DeFi and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), he believes that Coinbase would have attracted a lot of investment from retailers. According to him, if the company followed this path, its value would be more than double what it is now.

Shares should have gone public on the Coinbase platform…shares would be represented as ERC-20 tokens and could be transferred out into the wild and wonderful world of DeFi, and used as collateral in pools, leverage on it, and be redeemed to get shares back…sort of the way the USCD works with the dollar

This would be a new exciting form of an alternative asset that would excite the entire crypto industry.

Furthermore, more exchanges would be inclined to follow this path rather than going public and trying to attract traditional investors and navigate regulators, especially in the US.

Is Bitcoin price lag affecting Coinbase shares?

Instead of this, Coinbase went public on April 14 through a direct listing on Nasdaq using the ticker $COIN. Although more conventional than Carlson-Wee’s way, it is uncommon with most companies preferring an IPO. Using a direct listing, it meant that the company could not create new shares but employees and investor had to sell existing shares.

The shares have been on a steady decline for the last month. Since its launch when it set an all-time high of $428, the asset has been unable to revisit these levels again. At its peak, the company was valued at over $100 billion. In the days that followed, its share found stability around $300.

On Monday, Coinbase shares opened at $220. During the listing process, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong had argued that share performance was dependant on the Bitcoin movement. Bitcoin since topping at around $64,000 on the same day of the $COIN listing has not tested this high.

As Bitcoin prices pick up, Coinbase services will attract more traders and revenue which should see its shares rally.