In a tweet posted yesterday, Ran Neuner of CNBC claimed that they would reveal details regarding an Initial Public Offering (IPO) to be hosted by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase:

CNBC Cryptotrader exposes details of the Coinbase IPO raise tomorrow on a Cryptotrader exclusive. pic.twitter.com/YG4UOP3ju8 — Ran NeuNer (@cryptomanran) October 25, 2018

More information was indeed revealed today. Neuner has posted another tweet with a link to a video discussing the details of Coinbase’s valuation. It is revealed that Coinbase is raising $500 million U.S. dollars on a pre-IPO. A pre-IPO occurs when a portion of an IPO is placed with private investors right before the IPO is scheduled to hit the market.

There are distinct differences between an IPO and an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). ICO’s are a way of crowdfunding which includes creating and selling tokens to fund the start and the development of a project. IPO’s refer to the public sale of a company’s shares. It is an established process undertaken for a company to expand and become publicly traded.

Coinbase president Asiff Hirji first spoke about an IPO back in December of 2017. When asked about the possibility of taking the company public, he said:

“It is certainly in the interest of our investors…and the most obvious path of Coinbase is to go public at some point, but there’s a lot for us to do between now and then, whenever that date is.”

Coinbase is one of the most well-known cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. The evaluation of the company in pre-IPO revealed that it was worth between $7.2 to $8 billion USD.

Coinbase themselves have not yet revealed any information regarding an upcoming IPO.