ARK Invest, one of the companies to file for a spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF), is taking profits again as Coinbase (COIN) shares soar.
On Nov. 27, ARK sold 43,956 Coinbase shares from its ARK Fintech Innovation ETF (ARKF), according to transaction notifications seen by Cointelegraph. Data from TradingView shows Coinbase shares hit $119.7 per share at the time of the sale, valuing the transaction at $5.3 million.
Shares of the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange jumped to an 18-month high after rival exchange Binance and its former CEO Changpeng Zhao admitted money laundering and sanctions violations in the United States on November 21, 2023.
Data from TradingView shows that Coinbase shares have risen 168% in the past year and have soared more than 220% since January 2023. The stock is still down about 70%, or about 70%, from its all-time high of $319 in September 2021. A few months after the deal launched in April 2021.
ARK has been selling Coinbase stock multiple times during 2023. Cathie Wood’s investment firm previously sold 63,675 COIN shares from its ARK Next Generation Web ETF (ARKW) in October for a total of $5.1 million.
ARK was also actively selling Coinbase shares in July 2023, when the stock was trading around $90. The company sold more than $103 million in Coinbase shares in July, according to ARK trading data.
ARK has also been actively selling Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) shares. On November 24, ARKW sold 94,624 GBTC shares for approximately $3 million, after selling nearly 700,000 GBTC shares in a month.
Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said that ARK’s sale of GTBC does not indicate that the company is not optimistic about Bitcoin, nor does it indicate that the company is not making room for its upcoming spot Bitcoin ETFs, ARK Invest and 21Shares (ARKB). “Neither is true,” Balciunas wrote A comment on X (formerly Twitter) on November 27 mentioned his previous observation that ARK would likely sell winners and vice versa in order to maintain the desired weight.
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“With GBTC up 76% since August, ARK had to sell a lot of shares to maintain a weighting of around 9%. Even with the sell-off, its weighting is still up,” the ETF analyst noted.
While selling Coinbase and GBTC, ARK also bought a number of cryptocurrency-related stocks. On November 27, ARKF acquired 252,421 shares of cryptocurrency-friendly banking app SoFi. Year to date, ARK has purchased a total of 1.6 million SOFI shares, worth $11 million at today’s prices, according to Go to transaction view. ARK has also been increasing its holdings in cryptocurrency-friendly investing app Robinhood, purchasing $1.1 million worth of shares on November 8.
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