Coinbase is very profitable and has huge cash reserves for a company of its size. I don't see any reason why they would feel the need to IPO if not to take advantage of people's FOMO.
At a certain point people want to stop being billionaires on paper and to become billionaires with actual liquidity.
And the timing seems right -- Bitcoin is sky-high and could crash tomorrow. (I'm presuming here that Coinbase and BTC will be highly correlated, but who knows.)
I expect Coinbase becoming a publicly traded company benefits them to a greater extent in reducing the chance of regulatory destruction than they benefit from additional access to capital.
This is the correct take, IMO. This feels to me like a lot of higher-ups at Coinbase are sensing the peak of a crypto hype wave and want to take advantage of the moment to cash out and spread their risk around. Plus they have privileged access to real-time data on crypto market movement (I assume); they’ll know if a btc sell off is brewing long before anyone else. The fact that BTC only jumped to 64k is telling...
