The Ark Invest CEO said the recent Ripple court ruling is a major win for crypto exchanges.
Cathie Wood, the founder and CEO of ARK Investment Management, said she remains bullish over Coinbase in light of Ripple’s partial victory over the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 13.
While Wood noted the ruling wasn’t in outright favor of Ripple, she lauded the outcome as “by and large, very positive for [crypto] exchanges.”
Wood joins the ranks of crypto industry pundits who have made similar points, arguing that the ruling — which found that XRP (XRP) tokens sold to retail investors on crypto exchanges were not securities — could set a positive precedent for Coinbase and Binance in their respective legal battles with the regulator.
Wood explained that despite the crypto exchange receiving a Wells Notice in March and being hammered by a lawsuit from the SEC in June, the share price never fell to new lows, suggesting a robustness in the value of Coinbase stock.
On July 11, Wood’s flagship fund, the ARK Innovation exchange traded fund (ETF) cashed in on the crypto exchange’s impressive rally, selling 135,152 Coinbase shares, worth $12 million at the time.
Coinbase began 2023 trading at just $33.60 a share. At the time of publication shares of COIN have surged more than 184% since then to reach a price of $105.55 according to data from TradingView.
While many industry players are turning increasingly bullish on Coinbase, analysts from investment firm Berenberg Capital Markets warned that many aspects of regulation for crypto exchanges are far from being resolved.
In a July 17 investment note seen by Cointelegraph lead analyst Mark Palmer said that Coinbase Earn — a financial product that offers yield on crypto staking — appears “particularly vulnerable” to being defined as a security in light of the comments made by Judge Torres in her ruling on the Ripple case.