Public Keys: Coinbase IRL and Gemini Wants Bitcoin Believers to Look Up

Public Keys is a weekly roundup from Decrypt that tracks the key publicly traded crypto companies. This week: It’s spring time for Coinbase and on-chain assets. The company is going after its tokenized security white whale. CEO Brian Armstrong and his founders have been wanting to offer tokenized stocks since before the company even went public in 2021. Will they do it this time? Meanwhile: What’s that in the sky? An IPO, a new ETF? Turns out it’s both.

Real world wins for Coinbase

Things keep falling into place for Coinbase. This week alone, the company saw a lawsuit against it in Vermont dropped and got approval to offer its services in India.

Now, onlookers are watching to see if Coinbase will get the green light to offer tokenized securities. It’s something the company has wanted to do since before it went public in 2021.

If Coinbase got the OK to tokenize securities, it would be a huge boon for the already growing RWA, or real-world asset, segment.

The RWA market aims to bring assets like stocks, bonds, property, or even land on-chain. Sometimes that’s been looked at as gimmicky by traditional finance types. But Wall Street has been working to reduce settlement times for years. What faster way to get there than by bringing some assets on-chain?

Currently, BlackRock has dominated the RWA space. Just yesterday its BUIDL fund topped $1 billion worth of assets under management. The fund holds dollar-equivalent assets like cash, U.S. Treasury bills, and repurchase agreements. Next in line is the Hashnote Short Duration Yield Coin, which boasts an AUM of $868 million and grants traders exposure to short duration U.S. Treasuries and reverse repo U.S. Treasuries.

In the past month alone, RWAs grew by 18% to $18.3 billion, according to rwa.xyz.

RWAs are an interesting, but not at all surprising, counterbalance to the global crypto market—which has dropped 16% in the past month, according to CoinGecko data. As more RWA products come on-chain, it would mean investors could flock to the safety of T-bills without having to off-ramp funds into a traditional brokerage account.

But Coinbase doesn’t just want to do this on its home turf. The San Francisco company said in a blog post earlier this week it’s calling for “regulatory frameworks that match the scale of opportunity” in Europe.

This week the crypto exchange also launched 24/7 access to Bitcoin and Ethereum futures.

Adding more trading hours for its products is the kind of news that will likely help pad Coinbase’s bottom line. As the company pointed out in its most recent 10-K filing: “Our largest source of cash provided by operations are revenues generated from transaction fees.”

And as of the end of 2024, cash generated from operations had ballooned to $2.5 billion. That means that revenue stream has more than doubled from $922 million in 2023.

On Friday afternoon, Coinbase, which trades on the Nasdaq under the COIN ticker, closed at 183.12, up 3.17% on the day.

Up, IPO and away!

There’s a growing list of companies rumored to be considering an IPO in 2025, but—look, a flying Bitcoin (and an excuse to talk about this news we missed last week).

Last night, crypto exchange Gemini flew a Guinness World Record-breaking “aerial display of a cryptocurrency logo formed by multirotor/drones” in Austin, Texas.

What do you think we’ll see first: A buzzing horde of drones snatching their record or an IPO?

People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg last week that the company confidentially filed for an IPO with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. That means Gemini is the first to make the jump from the rumored IPO list—which includes stablecoin issuer Circle, crypto exchanges Bullish, Kraken, and Blockchain.com—into the actual race.

If any of the other crypto companies start filing IPO paperwork, it may be a while before investors hear about it because of relaxed Securities and Exchange Commission rules. But relaxed rules are precisely why this year could see an uptick in public offerings, according to a recent Law360 column.

Wen buy Bitcoin?

It was another bye week for Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin amassing Strategy.

The company, which recently changed its name from MicroStrategy and trades on the Nasdaq under the MSTR ticker, has seen its Bitcoin holdings remain unchanged at 499,096 Bitcoin since Feb. 24.

At the time, the company said that it had purchased Bitcoin for an average price of $97,500 per Bitcoin.

And bettors aren’t optimistic the company will announce a surprise buy over the weekend. Prediction market traders on MYRIAD doubt that Strategy will confirm a new Bitcoin purchase on Monday, estimating a 76% chance that the firm’s holdings remain unchanged for a third consecutive week. (Disclosure: MYRIAD is owned by Decrypt‘s parent company, DASTAN.)

On Friday afternoon, Strategy, which trades on the Nasdaq under the MSTR ticker, closed at 297.49, up a whopping 13% today.

Other keys

Asset manager Rex Shares is nothing if not creative. On Friday, the company launched an ETF to bring Startegy’s Bitcoin-backed bond offering to the everyman.

“Until now, these bonds have been difficult for individual investors to reach,” REX Financial CEO Greg King said in a statement. “BMAX removes those barriers making it easier to invest in the strategy pioneered by Michael Saylor.”

Earlier in the week, Rex and Osprey Funds applied to offer an ETF that would track the price of MOVE, the Movement Network token that launched in November. It’s also the same firm that filed to offer ETFs linked to Official Trump (TRUMP), BONK, and Dogecoin.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.