The CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, confirmed today through Twitter that the exchange has board approval to add $500 million of crypto assets to its balance sheet. Furthermore, it will place 10% of all future profits into crypto.
Back in February, when it was preparing to go public via direct listing, Coinbase published an S-1 filing that showed it owned about $365 million in crypto. $240 million of that was in Bitcoin, $53 million in Ethereum, $49 million in stablecoins, and the rest of $34 million in other crypto assets.
This meant that Coinbase was ranked at number four in the list of companies with the largest Bitcoin holdings, behind names such as MicroStrategy and Tesla.
Back-to-back record quarterly profits (the first one up to $800 million in Q1 and the second one up to $1.6 million in Q2) have made Coinbase’s board understand that there is a need for diversifying the holdings.
Coinbase registers the biggest share of its profit from transactions fees, but it also enjoyed high trading volumes during the previous quarter.
Armstrong declared that Coinbase would eventually “operate more of our business in crypto.”