According to the company’s daily trade notification, Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment sold about 1.42 million Coinbase Global shares on Tuesday from three of her ETFs, making it her first trade of COIN shares this year.
The stock transactions took place on the same day that Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange platform in the US, had a 21% value decline as a result of reports that the SEC is investigating whether or not some of the tokens traded there should be registered as securities.
According to the announcement, ARK Next Generation Internet ETF sold 174,611 shares, ARK Innovation ETF sold 1.13 million shares of Coinbase, and ARKT Fintech Innovation ETF sold 110,218 shares. The shares had a closing value of $75M on Tuesday.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint last week claiming insider trading of certain crypto assets by a former Coinbase employee. The SEC asserted that nine of the case’s digital assets constitute securities as part of that investigation, and it accused the person of securities fraud.
Paul Grewal, the Chief Legal Officer at Coinbase, stated in a blog post from last week that “Coinbase has a rigorous process to analyze and review each digital asset before making it available on our exchange — a process that the SEC itself has reviewed,” and “the majority of assets that we review are not ultimately listed on Coinbase.”
Coinbase stock is up 4.4 % in pre-market trade on Wednesday, recovering some of Tuesday’s loss.
Earlier, Cathie Wood added 1.76M shares to her ETFs by purchasing Shopify’s (SHOP) dip.