After the Coinbase exchange went public yesterday, a big name in managed funds is one of the first to buy in.
Reports today show the Ark Invest company bought $246 million in Coinbase (COIN) to add to its collection of prominent funds, starting with the ARKK innovation fund, which received $168 million in COIN.
Other Ark funds, including Ark’s next generation and fin tech funds, also got some of the Coinbase stock as a weighted asset.
In balancing, Ark reportedly sold $178 million of Tesla stock, which caused consternation among analysts, since Ark founder Catherine Wood has consistently been bullish on the electric vehicle market, and Tesla in particular. In fact, her early purchase of Tesla was part of what brought her to prominence and drove interest in the Ark funds themselves.
To date, ARKK has gone from $1 billion under management to $22 billion in total managed assets. The company enjoys an outsized reputation among investing fund choices. Meanwhile, Coinbase has gone up 11% with an estimated market capitalization of $100 billion.
It’s also interesting to note that in other recent moves, Ark sold 4.4 million of Intercontinental Exchange. For those who remember, this rival exchange is also one of the parties behind the Bakkt bitcoin futures market that, at least initially, did not function as its creators intended.
In some ways, when it comes to exchange operations, COIN is king: Cointelegraph shows a graph of competitive exchanges, with Coinbase at the very top. This may be only the start of a feeding frenzy on a new public offering that represents some stability in what can be a volatile sector. We reported yesterday on Binance offering a COIN token for fractional Coinbase stock purchasing, which may fan the flames even more.
If you are invested in crypto, keep an eye on this new powerhouse in exchange investing.