Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management has further trimmed its Coinbase holdings amidst the cryptocurrency exchange’s continued rally. ARK, known for its growth-focused strategy, sold an additional 248,838 shares of Coinbase (COIN), amounting to over $26 million based on the stock’s closing price on Monday, which touched $105.55, narrowly missing its one-year high. This transaction follows ARK’s sale of 480,000 COIN shares across three funds on July 14 and another $12 million worth of stock the previous week.
Wood remains unabashedly bullish on Coinbase, citing the recent court ruling in favor of Ripple against the SEC as a boost for the exchange. “We’re very positive about Coinbase, especially in light of the court ruling for Ripple against the SEC,” Wood said on Bloomberg Daybreak Asia. “We’re simply taking profits and reallocating the capital to some laggards.”
Coinbase’s robust performance amid regulatory uncertainty
Despite the ongoing lawsuit from the SEC and a Wells notice received in March, Coinbase’s stock value has shown remarkable resilience, never dipping to new lows. Wood and several other crypto pundits perceive this as a testament to the robustness of Coinbase shares. With Ripple’s court ruling, which found that XRP tokens sold to retail investors on crypto exchanges were not securities, a positive precedent for Coinbase and Binance in their respective legal disputes with the regulator is set.
Coinbase started 2023 trading at $33.60 per share. However, the crypto exchange’s stock has seen a significant surge, with a stellar 184% increase, currently at $105.55 a share. However, regulatory issues linger on the horizon, causing jitters among some analysts. Mark Palmer of Berenberg Capital Markets recently opined that many regulatory aspects for crypto exchanges remain unresolved and cited Coinbase Earn, a product offering yield on crypto staking, as “particularly vulnerable” to being classified as a security in the wake of Judge Analisa Torres’ comments in her Ripple ruling.