Intercontinental Exchange sells Coinbase stake for $1.2B

Intercontinental Exchange has sold its 1.4% stake in Coinbase to reduce the company’s debt.

Intercontinental Exchange, the operator of the New York Stock Exchange and the owner of Bakkt digital asset platform, has sold its 1.4% stake in the newly Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency firm Coinbase.

Announcing the news Thursday on a financial results call for the first quarter of 2021, ICE chief financial officer Scott Hill said that the company sold its Coinbase stake for $1.2 billion. The executive noted that the sale generated approximately $900 million net after taxes.

Hill said that the proceeds were used to reduce ICE’s debt at the end of the first quarter. He noted that the company’s pro forma leverage, or total indebtedness rate, would have been closer to 3.6x compared to 4.2x when ICE acquired mortgage-focused software company Ellie Mae in September 2020.

“We are definitely a bit ahead of schedule, been paying down debt faster than we sort of expected when we started the deal. I mean I would say we were doing that, though, before the Coinbase sale,” ICE’s incoming CFO Warren Gardiner added. He stressed that Coinbase proceeds gave the company “some additional flexibility” as ICE moves into the rest of the year. “We are down to about 3.6 leverage, the target is about 3.25, where we can start to think about buying back stock,” he noted.

ICE’s decision to sell Coinbase shares comes amid the company posting record revenues in Q1 2021 totaling $1.8 billion and up 4% year-over-year. “First quarter revenues, operating income, adjusted net income and adjusted earnings per share were all the best in the history of our company,” the CFO said. He stated that, while ICE’s total transaction revenues slightly declined versus last year, the amount of total recurring revenues increased by 9%.

As previously reported, ICE’s digital asset trading platform, Bakkt, is set to go public on NYSE in Q2 2021 through a merger with VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings.

The biggest crypto exchange in the United States, Coinbase went public on Nasdaq on April 14 with a direct listing of its COIN shares. The shares opened at $381, marking heightened institutional demand as the stock’s pre-listing reference price was just $250. The Coinbase stock closed Thursday trades at $294, following a gradual decline after the listing, according to data from TradingView.

*COIN share all-time price chart. Source: TradingView*

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, multiple COIN investors including Coinbase executives sold $5 billion in COIN stocks shortly after listing. Notable sales included those of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, selling nearly 750,000 shares netting at a total of around $292 million.

from https://ift.tt/3sZZhAo
https://ift.tt/3xJIFkb

Comments

DeFi isn’t dead, it just needs to fix these 3 critical problems

It’s been a rough year for DeFi, and it may not get any better until projects focus more on security, regulation and usability. The persistent challenges decentralized finance face have been well documented by a handful of analysts and the recent collapse of the Terra ecosystem re-enforced the fact that something is critically wrong with DeFi. I think DeFi today is completely broken for 99% of the population. The promise of a more transparent financial system has been overtaken by greed. UST/LUNA is just the latest in a string of bad developments: — Peter Yang (@petergyang) May 11, 2022 Let's take a look at what experts say DeFi needs to do in order to have another revival. Improved usability To date, the promise of open and uncensored access to a global decentralized financial system has been largely hampered by the complicated interface, confusing multi-step staking processes and lack of clarity surrounding the yields on various tokens. What do you thi...

ENS DAO delegates offer perspective on DAO governance and decentralized identity

AlphaWallet CEO and Spruce co-founder talk about their roles as contributors to the Ethereum Name Service following the project's recent airdrop. Earlier this month, the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, formed a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, for the ENS community. Cointelegraph spoke to two ENS DAO delegates who applied for the opportunity to represent the community and stay involved in the decision making process: Victor Zhang, CEO of AlphaWallet, an open source Ethereum wallet, and Gregory Rocco, co-founder of Spruce, a decentralized ID and data toolkit for developers. Zhang spoke about his experience as an external contributor to ENS and an early supporter since 2018. Zhang initially sought to help ENS by offering Alpha Wallet as a user-friendly tool for resolving .eth names and cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Essentially, if a user inputs an .eth name in the AlphaWallet, it will show the wallet address, and vice versa using reverse resolution. Alpha...

Institutional demand for crypto isn’t subsiding, but impact will be gradual

As another $2-trillion stimulus package looms in the U.S., institutions will continue to look at BTC as a hedge against inflation. For example, just last week, when the currency was hovering around the $30,000 threshold, a whole host of pundits was warning investors to brace for impact, suggesting that the premier crypto asset was on the verge of a correction and could once again dip to around the $20,000 region. However, in just one day, Bitcoin was once again playing with the bulls, retesting the $38,500 limit, only to witness a selloff and eventually settle around the $33,500 region. While for most crypto veterans that might have been another day at the office, others branded the upsurge as “Elon’s Candle,” which relates to Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, who included “Bitcoin” in his Twitter bio as well as sent out the following cryptic message “in retrospect, it was inevitable” to his 40 million-odd followers online. Regardless of the cause, has the recent price volatility sca...

Crypto Coin Search

Search This Blog