Eligible US customers can now request an allocation in an initial public offering directly through the Coinbase app, with wearable maker Oura as the first company offered, a 50 million share sale priced between $40 and $44 that began trading this week on the Nasdaq under the ticker OURA. The service runs through Coinbase Capital Markets, a FINRA-registered broker-dealer Coinbase built specifically to handle it.
Customers can request shares before public trading opens and, if allocated, buy at the IPO offer price rather than whatever the stock does once it starts moving. Coinbase is explicit that a request is not a guarantee. Investors may receive all, part or none of what they ask for, depending on total demand and how large the offering is. A 30-day holding rule sits alongside the mechanism itself. Selling allocated shares within a month risks a 60-day lockout from requesting any future IPO through the app.
The move puts Coinbase in direct competition with the retail brokerages, Robinhood chief among them, that have spent the past few years building similar IPO access as a customer acquisition tool. For Coinbase, an exchange built for buying bitcoin and ether, it is a bet that the same customer base wants exposure to traditional equity offerings too, and that trust built moving crypto extends to a very different kind of allocation risk.
The part Coinbase has not addressed is what happens when a popular offering is oversubscribed many times over, which is the normal state of a hot IPO. A request that returns a token handful of shares, or none, from a widely marketed offering is a different experience from the one the announcement implies, and Coinbase has not published how it will decide who gets what.
