Will coins outperform the companies that support them?
Will BTC outperform the companies that support it?
Impressive as Coinbase's growth to $70 billion is, the company’s market cap has actually lagged behind Bitcoin's growth since the company's Series B funding round in 2013. (It's better to invest in Satoshi than in yourself.)
Other crypto infrastructure "blue chips" have also struggled to keep up with the underlying public assets. In Bitcoin terms, Digital Currency Group (DCG), the parent company of Coinbase and a major player in the crypto investment space, is a true burn machine, having declined by about 80% in Bitcoin terms since 2015. The numbers look even worse when comparing the company to Layer 1 tokens like ETH. (It's better to invest in Vitalik than in yourself.)
On the other hand, Binance's platform token BNB appreciated to an all-time high within four years, largely due to Binance converting 20% of its profits into BNB to incentivize new users to register on the exchange. With a market cap exceeding $90 billion, BNB is valued at 3-4 times the company's valuation.
Compared to helping retail investors gain returns in this field, IPOs and ETFs may be more important for attracting institutions and reinforcing the mainstream narrative of Crypto. Coinbase could be a trillion-dollar company; BITO ETF is the fastest ETF in history to accumulate $1 billion in investor capital. Public stocks are like diplomas in Crypto, which may be important to your parents but not so much to your friends who can access better native Crypto tools (including Token exchanges and index funds).
The best part of newly listed stocks (COIN and BITO) is the free marketing and insights gained by Crypto natives from their prospectuses and earnings reports. Using Coinbase, you can track their non-trading lines to get a good understanding of which custody services are emerging. SBF also likes free intelligence. With BITO and futures ETFs, we can obtain top PR collateral (all sorts of media projects used for marketing purposes), and we can use these collaterals to slap SEC Chairman Gary Gensler and expose his fraud. Therefore, besides tokens, there are the above benefits of owning public stocks.