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ARK Invest's CEO, Cathie Wood, referred to Coinbase (COIN), among some other innovation-focused companies, as being key players in blockchain technology which, according to her, continues to reinvent finance and technology.
In a post on May 14, she referred to Tesla (TSLA), Palantir (PLTR), Coinbase (COIN), and Shopify (SHOP) as companies that are "at the tip of the spear" in the transformation of the equity markets.
Wood's comments were in response to ARK analyst Frank Downing, who commented on ARK's early investment in Coinbase.
He noted that he published a whitepaper with the crypto exchange as far back as January 2017, before they were able to raise its Series D round at a $1.6 billion valuation.
Downing praised Coinbase's user onboarding process into crypto and their approach of focusing on "high product velocity" and innovation.
Wood echoed those thoughts, saying that technologically enabled companies like Coinbase are not only disrupting the old way of thinking about and measuring finance but are changing the benchmarks by measuring market activity and performance.
“Benchmarks are likely to chase innovation at an accelerated rate in the years ahead” she said, expressing her expectation that the inclusion of values and performance of their collective innovation legacy will increasingly be updated.
The remarks followed Coinbase's announcement that it would be joining the S&P 500 index, a significant step towards mainstream acceptance for the crypto sector.
Wood has previously predicted that the S&P 500 will reach 6,400 in the next five years in a base case scenario, and 11,200 in a bull case, in a 2023 ARK report, owing mostly to the exponential expansion of technology.