Ark Invest dumps 1.4m Coinbase shares ‘at 80% loss’
Cathie Wood’s firm has sold the $COIN shares it supposedly bought for $255 each for around $53 per share
Ark Invest has dumped 1.4 million Coinbase shares for $53 a share, Cathie Woods, the company’s founder and one of the most popular crypto investors, has revealed, amid reports of the trading firm being under investigation from the SEC.
Ark sold the shares, $COIN, at a price of around $53 per share. The firm bought the shares at an average price of $254, according to the Twitter account @unusual_whales, taking close to an 80% hit on the price.
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Ark was the third-biggest shareholder in the trading firm Coinbase, holding around 8.95 million shares, according to Bloomberg. Just in May, Ark Invest purchased more than 500,000 shares in Coinbase, worth $29m at the time.
Coinbase under scrutiny from SEC
Earlier this week it was revealed that Coinbase, one of the largest crypto platforms in the US, would face an investigation from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on whether it let users trade cryptocurrencies that were identified as unregistered securities.
Coinbase’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, responded to the headlines with a blog post stating that Coinbase does not offer securities. The post said: “Tl;dr: Coinbase does not list securities on its platform. Period.”
Grewal also took to Twitter to make his case, saying: “I’m happy to say it again and again: we are confident that our rigorous diligence process – a process the SEC has already reviewed – keeps securities off our platform, and we look forward to engaging with the SEC on the matter.”
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The price of Coinbase shares tumbled by more than 20% after the news of the SEC probe was published. The past few months have not been plain sailing for the crypto firm, after it announced in June that it would cut more than 1,000 staff members amid greater volatility and uncertainty in the cryptocurrency sector.
