Institutional business is a more lucrative market than the consumer space, and nobody can service this space at the moment, despite demand. What the market is lacking is trustworthy operators who have execution technology and balance sheet.

Coinbase have done better than other players at getting their trust brand right with consumers and regulators. A conventional public listing will further enhance that.

Through the Tagomi acquisition, Coinbase picked up a team who know execution technology.

Through the float, they will get balance sheet.

There are strong network effects between these business units. For example, once you have your smart-order-router and algos for institutions, you can also offer it to consumers. By having your own liquidity pool and active market-makers, you can internalise flow that you would otherwise have dispatched to other venues, and save on execution costs.

It may be a winner-takes-all market.

I am not saying they will succeed, but the sky is the limit.

Could an existing exchange like say ICE or CME jump into the fray to service institutional investors? They already have much of the infrastructure to handle much larger trading flows than Coinbase. Talent/tech required to compete could be aqui-hired

They could, but it feels like a stretch. I suspect it would be easier to make a move for that space from an existing institutional broker like Instinet or Virtu.

Offering crypto trading is a stretch for an established exchange? ICE and CME already have some crypto but not much yet.

For what other exchange of futures or FX is the sky the limit?

This is nonsense! Consumer businesses are the largest and most profitable in the world by a mile.

True, but it's not like tech. stocks valuation are in any way rational in the last year and a half, so why should CB be any different?

There's already an exchange (Binance) with 9x the volume of Coinbase and a fraction of the fees, however, the USA has been quite hostile to them compared to CB, so it's not exactly easy to 'step up' at least there.

Couldn't you say the same for traditional stock exchanges? In that space most of the volume also concentrates on a few ones

CBOE has a market cap of $10 billion (on revenues of $3 billion) ICE has a market cap of $66 billion (on revenues of $8 billion)

Coinbase's market cap is going to be higher than both exchanges combined - while doing a fifth of the revenue.

Yeah but Coinbase has trend behind them. Who cares about others when nobody talks? Nikola as an ENTIRELY fake company made it to billions of valuation and stayed there for months while everyone could easily prove it! with help of media too! So when valuing big companies just with revenue and calculations is bit wrong and misses trends and such, especially recently. This market is irrational and bit of scam too.