Cryptocurrencies have quickly become one of the hottest investment vehicles of the last decade, gaining traction, as in 2017, first from retailers and now from institutional investors.
From a domain of bedroom coders to a growing financial sector with a market cap of over $ 2 trillion, the crypto space has seen a sudden surge in value and continues to attract great interest from investors.
While crypto assets have proven valuable, volatility remains a major concern, especially for institutional players. Of course, any investor can buy some cryptocurrencies and benefit from their increasing value. However, investing in established companies in the crypto and blockchain business is another way to diversify and benefit from the general acceptance of everything blockchain and crypto related.
This gives investors exposure to an investment vehicle with a low correlation to the volatile price fluctuations of the crypto market.
Here’s a look at some of the leading publicly traded digital asset companies available to retail and institutional investors alike.
Coin base
Coinbase’s direct listing on Nasdaq in April this year marked a turning point for the entire cryptocurrency market. Coinbase is the largest crypto trading volume for a crypto exchange in the United States and debuted on the Nasdaq as a publicly traded company with a valuation of nearly $ 100 billion. Coinbase opted for a direct listing as opposed to the traditional IPO.
Coinbase was founded in 2012 by Fred Ersham and Brian Armstrong and provides crypto trading services to more than 40 million retail users and approximately 7,000 institutions around the world. While the main source of income has been transaction fees on the crypto exchange, Coinbase is hoping to go beyond trading and offer a debit card that consumers can use to conveniently spend their digital assets. Coinbase also offers a cloud-based custody service for digital assets, a credit service for assets and a data monitoring service for digital assets on the blockchain.
Related: Coinbase Launches Standalone Browser Extension for Coinbase Wallet
Micro-strategy
Microstrategy is a software company that invests more than 40% of its market valuation in Bitcoin (BTC). The company topped up its Bitcoin stash last year with a cumulative purchase of Bitcoin valued at more than $ 5 billion at current prices.
With more than 100,000 BTC, Microstrategy has gone from the relative darkness of the financial world to a crypto giant and a well-known company on Wall Street. The company’s CEO, Michael Saylor, a Bitcoin evangelist, routinely touts Bitcoin as a revolutionary invention on social media, and also vigorously defends the company’s move to aggressively invest in crypto.
Recently, MicroStrategy sold its $ 1 billion stock holdings to invest the proceeds in acquiring more Bitcoin. Since the company announced its debut on Bitcoin, Microstrategy’s share price has risen more than 400%.
Related: MicroStrategy added 9K BTC last quarter, its stash is now worth $ 7 billion
Riot blockchain
Riot Blockchain is a US-based and publicly traded Bitcoin mining company that uses a variety of specialized machines called application-specific integrated circuits to mine Bitcoin. Recently, the bitcoin mining company got deeper into the business with the purchase of a bitcoin hosting facility in North America called Whinstone US.
In a press release, Riot Blockchain CEO Jason Les noted that “With Whinstone’s outstanding infrastructure and world-class engineering, development and operations organization, Riot is extremely well positioned to expand the scope and scope of its operations.”
Whinstone’s energy management strategy will reportedly help Riot Blockchain manage its bitcoin mining energy bills and provide access to reliable and responsive power supplies to further support the bitcoin network.
Riot Blockchain gets its mining machines from Bitmain and is home to more than 35,000 Antminers, resulting in a hash rate capacity of 3.8 EH / s.
Similarly, industrial Bitcoin mining is breathing new life into a small Texan town
Paypal
Although PayPal stocks are not a pure crypto game, the company opened its doors to digital currencies, allowing its personal accounts customers to buy, sell, and hold multiple cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin. Customers at PayPal can go so far as to check out with crypto, even as the company continues to test the concept of allowing crypto on its platform.
Given that digital assets and crypto are the future of finance, PayPal’s introduction of crypto is a step towards increasing consumer use of its app and enabling more transactions between customers and merchants.
In addition, the company’s CEO has mentioned crypto several times, adding that its crypto functionality is not a speculative step, but a development step that gives customers more choices when shopping online.
Related: PayPal is seeing its largest bitcoin volume since the BTC price crash in May
Marathon Digital Holdings
Marathon Digital is a Nasdaq-listed company that has seen a recent price rally due to its Bitcoin purchases and mining activities. In May of this year, the company released a letter of intent to partner with Compute North to host a bitcoin mining data center with a capacity of 300 megawatts.
So far, the company has made tremendous strides, growing its revenue 1.444% year over year, with a host of over 70,000 bitcoin miners setting its hash rate at 10.37 EH / s. Given the growing concerns about Bitcoin mining energy and recent developments, Marathons Digital expects up to 70% carbon neutrality.
Marathon Digital’s balance sheet has invested about 18.3% of its total valuation in cash and bitcoin and continues to buy more bitcoin and store the crypto it produces at much higher percentages. According to reports, Marathon Digital is able to mine more than 50 bitcoin per day, which puts the company’s worth at over $ 5 billion.
Related: Marathon Digital Stock Hits 6-Year High as Company $ 460M
Hut 8 mining
Hut 8 Mining offers a unique approach to Bitcoin mining with a business model designed for scalability. Considered one of the most promising mining and blockchain infrastructure companies based in Canada, the company mined 264 bitcoin in September alone, which is an average of around 9.11 BTC per day.
The company has been pursuing a long-term Bitcoin hold strategy of holding 100% of the Bitcoin it owns as the company moves closer to its goal of holding 5,000 Bitcoin it has owned by the end of the year. As of September 30th, Hut 8 Mining had accumulated 4,724 Bitcoin in custody.
Related: Crypto miner Hut 8 plans to hold 5,000 bitcoin through 2022
EQONEX group
EQONEX Group is a digital asset company providing financial advisory services. This Nasdaq-listed company has since renamed itself with additional services such as a crypto exchange, custody platform, and multi-venture trading service, as well as an over-the-counter (OTC) offering.
With a listing on the Nasdaq in September 2020, EQONEX has since become the first crypto-related company to be listed on the Nasdaq. So far, the crypto exchange has grown to have a 24-hour trading volume of over $ 260 million and a 30-day volume of $ 4.5 billion.
While not one of the largest crypto exchanges, EQONEX touts its compliance with regulations and the fact that it does not create markets, which avoids the conflict of trading with its clients.
Growing institutional interest
Investing in stocks of digital asset companies offers a distinct advantage as the investor is not directly exposed to the volatile market movements that disrupt the rest of the crypto market.
Investing in crypto-related companies also provides an investor with the convenience of avoiding the complexities associated with buying and keeping digital assets safe, while exposing the investor to the benefits of the crypto and blockchain industries.
Investing directly or indirectly, it has never been easier for institutional capital to flow into the crypto and digital asset markets, given the growing number of digital asset companies whose stocks are publicly traded on exchanges such as the Nasdaq.
Even companies like Nvidia and AMD are increasingly contributing to the crypto and blockchain industry thanks to the use of their graphic processing units in crypto mining. These are just a few of the many publicly traded digital asset companies that investors can look out for when it comes to traditional ways of investing in crypto.
