Scaramucci surprised at lack of banking response to Coinbase listing

Will competing companies come out of the woodwork?

After much anticipation, Coinbase listed on the Nasdaq on Wednesday via a direct listing. Skybridge founder Anthony Scaramucci thinks the event should have been met with more attention from banks. 

“What I’m surprised about frankly is there isn’t a wake-up call at the banks, the commercial banks, like there was for the Netscape IPO in 1995 at microsoft,” Scaramucci told CNBC on Friday after noting Coinbase’s connection with Bitcoin, in line with the asset’s growth and technical framework.

He added:

“Bill Gates thought the internet was a fad. He then realized what was happening with the Netscape IPO and he deployed several billion dollars into an internet strategy which led to Explorer [Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s browser] and adapted and pivoted into it. I’m surprised the commercial banks, people like Jamie Dimon, aren’t pouring money into a clone of Coinbase.”

Michael Novogratz, Galaxy Digital’s CEO, also recently mentioned Netscape’s debut as similar in gravity to the Coinbase listing. He noted the digital asset company’s public emergence as a key point in cryptocurrency adoption.

“I think this is a seminal event,” Scaramucci said of the Coinbase listing, subsequently noting that he holds some shares of Coinbase. “It trades like Facebook and Google traded in the first couple of days,” he noted, adding:

“People were looking at lackluster performance after the IPO and then look at those stocks over the ensuing years.”

Coinbase stock spiked up to roughly $429 on its listing day, but has since retraced, trading near $340 at time of publication, based on TradingView data. The crypto company trades under the ticker symbol COIN, but a tokenized version of the stock also exists on crypto derivatives exchange FTX.