New listings show why web3’s Wall Street journey is still in its early stages
Ether fans celebrated the launch of U.S.-listed funds on the token. But we’re still far from true mass adoption of crypto among investors.
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Everyone on Wall Street loves a hot IPO.
Bankers make mammoth commissions, reporters usually publish a good scoop or three prior to trading, venture investors cash out with huge profits, and the mom-and-pop types get to feel cool once they can finally get their hands on whatever the latest object of some investment mania happens to be.
In crypto world, new stock-market listings play one other role as well: validation. The more that such links beteween traditional finance and digital currencies proliferate, the more legitimate the latter becomes in popular perception and perhaps less associated with debacles like FTX.
The Ethereum community celebrated its version of an IPO last week after the Securities and Exchange Commission gave its final approval for exchange-traded funds (ETFs) holding ether tokens on investors’ behalf. The new funds began public trading Tuesday, attracting heavy investor interest on traditional Wall Street venues like the New York Stock Exchange.
First-day trading volume topped $1 billion, driven by $107 million of net inflow of investor cash into the new funds.
Ether’s token price fell 5% for the week, but that hardly dampened the mood. ETH fans were glad to have cleared a milestone akin to the launch of bitcoin ETFs in January — a development that has clearly helped boost that token over the longer haul.
It’s also worth noting that last week was a tepid one on Wall Street in general, including the Nasdaq Composite Index’s worst daily loss of 2024 on Wednesday, spurred by weaker than expected earnings from Tesla and Alphabet. The S&P 500 also fell on the week, but the Dow Jones Industrial Average managed a small gain on hopes that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates soon.
Perhaps a more sobering sign for crypto fans should be a certain less-heralded IPO last week: The cold storage company Lineage went public on Nasdaq, fetching an $18 billion total valuation. That made it the largest corporate IPO in the U.S. so far this year.
One catch, though: Lineage doesn’t do the sort of cold storage that cryptoheads advocate, meaning offline storage of tokens for heightened security against hackers.
No, Lineage does the old-school version of cold storage involving bags of peas, racks of ribs, and lobsters. It’s one of the largest providers of such logistics in the U.S., with corporate clients like Kraft Heinz, Darden Restaurants, and Walmart, according to the Wall Street Journal.
That really puts things in a certain perspective, I think. For all the strides crypto has made on Wall Street this year, it’s still quantifiably a pretty small, specialized niche as far as the general public is concerned.
To most normies, the tokenized economy is still overshadowed by companies that do mundane things like operate scads of refrigerators in warehouses. Food for thought indeed.
