Coinbase shares were indicated to open $100 above their Tuesday reference price of $250 on Wednesday morning (EDT), in what is set to be a major milestone in the brief history of cryptocurrencies.

The US exchange’s direct listing comes only a day after the world’s most popular digital asset, Bitcoin, set a new all-time high of $64,788 and when the entire cryptocurrency market capitalisation surpassed that of Apple.

With a little over 11.3 per cent of the total crypto asset market on Coinbase and 56 million users around the word, the nine-year-old company is a major player in a sector that has shifted from the margins of the financial world into the mainstream.

Co-founder and CEO Bryan Armstrong owns 39.6 million shares in the company, a stake worth just under $14bn.

Coinbase stated that it enjoyed a ninefold increase in revenue year-on-year when announcing its preliminary first-quarter results last week. In addition to the $1.8bn in revenue and net income of $730-$800m, the company also revealed that its monthly transacting users (MTUs) had more than doubled in the space of three months, from 2.8 million to 6.1 million.  

By mid-morning (EDT), Bitcoin traded down 0.2 per cent at $62,994, while Ether stood 1.4 per cent higher at $2,328. The total capitalisation of the cryptocurrency market stood at $2.18trn, having been at $192bn only a year before.

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