With Bitcoin price surging past $100K to make new highs every other day and altcoins flying, the cryptocurrency market is having its best time. Amidst this strong positive momentum, fintech leader Exodus is being uplisted on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
This was revealed in an official announcement from Exodus last week in which the company noted that its common stock has been approved for listing on the NYSE American stock exchange.
“Exodus is thrilled to uplist on the NYSE American. It’s crucial that America’s innovative companies can trade on America’s premier stock exchanges. We expect this uplisting will raise Exodus’ corporate profile while also enhancing liquidity for our current and future shareholders.”
– JP Richardson, CEO and co-founder of Exodus, said in a statement
The company’s Class A common stock, having a par value of $0.000001, will begin trading on the NYSE American under its current ticker, “EXOD,” on December 18, 2024, as trading opens on the exchange.
This means that the stocks will continue trading at their current venue until the close of the market on December 17, 2024. Company stockholders aren’t required to take any action prior to this expected listing.
Currently, the company stocks are trading in the OTC market under the ticker EXOD. The marketplace EXOD is trading at OTCQX, which is the top tier one for the over-the-counter (OTC) trading of stocks that aren’t listed on traditional exchanges.
The OTCQX is provided and operated by the OTC Markets Group. In order to trade in these markets, stocks must meet qualification criteria, which are more stringent than those of other marketplaces like the OTCQB.
When a security is trading on the OTC market, it is traded via a broker-dealer network rather than a centralized exchange like the NYSE. Financial products like stocks, bonds, ADRs, and derivatives trade on these markets.
Stocks traded through the OTC market are generally from smaller companies that either do not wish to be listed on standard exchanges or cannot meet the listing requirements of formal exchanges. Getting a listing on a standard centralized exchange is not only an expensive process but also a time-consuming one.
So, stocks that trade on exchanges like NYSE are called listed stocks, while those that trade through OTC are called unlisted stocks.
OTC markets, however, are a great way to access securities that are not available on standard exchanges. Also, there are fewer regulations here. These lenient reporting requirements and comparatively lower transparency tend to make OTC markets riskier.
Stocks trading on OTC tend to also have less trade liquidity due to low volume, which means they are also more volatile. Now, many stocks in the OTC market end up failing, but there are some that eventually make their way to major exchanges, and Exodus (EXOD) is now among those select few.
A Long and Arduous Journey Comes to Fruition
Exodus is the leading self-custodial cryptocurrency software platform that has been working on its mission to make digital assets accessible to everyone for close to a decade now. This makes Exodus one of the early market participants that have been helping take crypto mainstream globally.
Over the last few years, the company has been making gradual progress in making its shares widely available to investors. So, this year, it focused its efforts on getting listed on NYSE American, an exchange owned by NYSE, the world’s largest stock exchange operator in the world by market capitalization of listed companies at $30.15 trillion.
Those efforts are now finally coming to fruition. However, the path to uplisting has been a long and arduous one, as noted by the company in its investor update on the SEC Review of Registration Statement earlier this month.
Interestingly, Exodus stocks were planned to get their listing on the NYSE American Stock Exchange in May this year when it was axed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) at the last moment.
The original listing was meant to go live on May 9, 2024, for which Exodus received approval from the NYSE American less than a week prior to that. However, just the day before the listing day, the exchange informed Exodus that they had to delay the listing until the SEC completed its review of the company’s registration statement on Form 10.
At the time, CEO Richardson shared his surprise and confusion by the agency’s last-minute decision but remained “hopeful that the SEC will follow through on its commitment to treat us as the law intends.” While Exodus expected a “swift resolution,” it took more than six months for things to come to a conclusion.
According to Exodus’ update on the SEC staff’s review, the company’s initial Registration Statement, which is subject to SEC review, was filed on the last days of Feb. this year. About a month later, Exodus received comments on its filing from the SEC and started working on responding and making any changes as required.
The same month, on April 28, the Registration Statement automatically became effective. This had Exodus subject to certain public reporting requirements of the Exchange Act, including the requirement to file annual reports, quarterly reports, and current reports.
Over the next seven months, the company had a constant back and forth with the security regulator, which has received a lot of pushback from the industry due to its crackdown on crypto.
Things are finally looking up for the crypto sector, with SEC Chair Gary Gensler—under whom the agency took several enforcement actions against crypto companies—set to exit next month and President-elect Donald Trump nominating Paul Atkins as his replacement.
As Trump noted in his official nomination announcement, which he made on his social-media site Truth Social:
“[Atkins] recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.”
Atkins is the co-chair of the crypto lobbying group Token Alliance, which is an initiative from the Chamber of Digital Commerce that promotes the use and acceptance of blockchain technology and digital assets. In addition to optimism surrounding a crypto-friendly SEC, the cryptocurrency market is also preparing for the most pro-crypto administration in the US ever.
Amidst this back and forth, on December 4, Exodus received a request for confirmation from the SEC staff. The following day, the company was notified that the regulator’s review of its filing was complete.
With that, Exodus stated that:
“[It] remains committed to listing on a national securities exchange at a future date, now that the SEC Staff have completed their review of the Registration Statement.”
This week, Exodus finally got a listing on NYSE. So, what does this uplisting entail? Let’s take a deeper look into all the ways it will benefit EXOD and its investors.
NYSE Uplisting: What Does it Mean for EXOD?
Stock uplisting has started to become a common practice in recent years as more and more companies aim to gain the benefits of trading on a top-tier exchange like NYSE or Nasdaq. These top centralized exchanges, after all, come with their brand, reputation, volume, visibility, and access to institutional investors.
This isn’t much different from what we see in the crypto space. After all, not all exchanges are the same, and some well-known names can make all the difference in a project to reach a wider audience and gain broader adoption.
But what does it mean in the traditional finance world? Uplisting in mainstream financial markets is the elevation of a company by having its stock listed on a major stock exchange like the NYSE.
This shift from an alternative trading platform like OTC markets to NYSE is not that easy, though. For a company to succeed in uplisting, they have to go through many challenges. This includes increased regulatory oversight and competition. Investor expectations and public scrutiny also go up.
The process, meanwhile, begins with the company’s stock complying with the listing rules of the exchanges. The listing requirements may include minimum share price and market value thresholds, a sound board of directors, robust reporting practices, and corporate governance standards. There’s also a listing fee, which can easily be divided into six figures.
One of the popular names that have successfully made this transition recently is American streaming business FuboTV (FUBO +0.96%), whose stocks skyrocketed after it got uplisted from the OTC to the NYSE in October 2020.
And now, Exodus is all set for its uplisting, which marks a big moment for the platform, which offers a multi-asset software wallet for desktop, mobile, and browser.
With its uplisting, Exodus will be offering several benefits to its existing investors, starting with a strong increase in liquidity. Given that NYSE American is a prominent platform, it will boost EXOD exposure, which will, in turn, lead to an increase in its trading volume.
Notably, this increased exposure should bring more institutional investors to Exodus, as sophisticated investors tend to avoid OTC stocks due to risks and restrictions. Then there’s the general interest in crypto, and EXOD’s uplisting will give TradFi a fresh stock, which is deeply involved in crypto, to get their hands on and diversify.
In addition to paving the way for institutional ownership and ease of share buying and selling, a major uplisting like this means greater visibility, coverage, and credibility for Exodus.
All these factors together can help the price of EXOD, which is currently trading at $36.50, having risen more than 622% this year, rally to new heights. A potential price appreciation for EXOD is to be expected with an uplisting, but more importantly, it will be in line with the ongoing bullish crypto momentum, which has sent the total cryptocurrency market cap to a new peak of almost $4 trillion as everyone from retail and institutional investor rush in to get a piece of this mania.
Leading the Innovation Charge
With this upcoming uplisting, Exodus has made yet another exemplary move that not many are able to achieve. But this isn’t the first time that Exodus has pulled such a great achievement.
Back in 2021, Exodus also became one of the first to issue digital securities of its stocks through Securitize, the leading platform to tokenize real-world assets (RWA) that provides end-to-end solutions for companies to raise capital compliantly while enabling individual investors to participate.
The tokenization trend has been gaining a lot of traction this year, capturing the interest of some of the biggest traditional finance (TradFi) investors like BlackRock (BLK -1.31%), JP Morgan, Citi, Franklin Templeton, and more. The tokenization market, which involves putting real-world assets like stocks, bonds, debt, real estate, and art on blockchain, is projected to be worth trillions of dollars.
While the market has begun to catch up on this trend only now, Exodus onboarded this train years ago. During the bull market of 2021, Exodus did a $75 million mini IPO raise from over 6,800 investors through the Securitize platform, which enabled the company to offer digital representation of its shares.
This capital raise allowed Exodus to reach out to individual investors and offer them the opportunity to invest in an early-stage, high-growth company, something that has been limited by the regulations to only the likes of accredited investors and private equity firms.
Securitize also helped with onboarding investors, issuing shares as digital tokens, and managing share ownership and activity. More importantly, for the groundbreaking offering, Securitize collected necessary investor information and performed Know Your Client (KYC) checks for Exodus, allowing the digital asset company to give its customers direct ownership of the platform.
With this capital raise, the idea has been to “first turn to our existing customers and fans, and give them the opportunity to become owners in our business before Wall Street,” said CEO Richardson in an official statement.
Then, in May 2022, the trading of Exodus shares under the symbol (OTC: EXOD) began trading on Securitize Markets.
As EXOD shares began trading on Securitize Markets, it offered Exodus investors a number of benefits, including round-the-clock order placement and near-instant deposits that also covered USDC, the 2nd largest stablecoin by market cap of $42.37 billion.
“Exodus is a major success story and proof point for the ability of private businesses to raise serious capital from their own customers and fans, to reward them for their early support and loyalty, and to align customer interests with business interests.”
– Carlos Domingo, CEO of Securitize at the time
Moving Towards a Prosperous Future
Exodus is now looking towards a thriving time ahead as the company continues to drive the future of accessible and secure finance by offering its customers complete control over their funds through self-custodial wallets.
A self-custodial or non-custodial wallet enables its users to take full responsibility for their wealth and financial freedom by eliminating the need for a third party or custodian to secure their crypto. While a wallet provider like Exodus gives users the software necessary to store crypto, the user has to remember the passwords and seed phrases to access the funds.
Exodus’ self-custodial wallets not only provide complete ownership but also offer the ability to buy, sell, and swap crypto. The company’s business solutions meanwhile include XO Swap and Passkeys Wallet for swap aggregation and embedded digital asset wallets.
For its preliminary Q4 financial results, which are unaudited by Exodus’ independent registered public accounting firm, Deloitte, the company reported processing $1.26 billion in volume for October and November combined. This marks a significant increase from the $0.96 billion processed during the entire third quarter, reflecting heightened investor interest following BTC’s price surge.
As a result of the ongoing momentum, Exodus is now holding more than 1,900 in BTC and over 2,660 in ETH as of December 11, 2024.
The record volume by Exodus’ Exchange Aggregator in this ongoing quarter has sent the company’s revenues skywards, too. The associated revenue helped the company add 100 BTC to its treasury since the end of 3Q24, during which it reported $194.7 million in digital assets and cash. This included $120.8 million in BTC and ETH and $69.8 million in cash and cash equivalents, USDC, and treasury bills as of September 30, 2024.
These new records came on the back of a successful Q3, in which the company achieved many milestones. This included a 69% increase in its processing volume from the previous quarter, with BTC and USDT (based on Tron and Ethereum network, in this order), with Ethereum being the top traded assets.
The platform’s monthly active users in the quarter also reached 1.6 million in Q3 2024, compared to 1.1 million in Q3 2023.
In addition to recording greater user activity along with “high year-over-year revenue growth and profitability,” the company also partnered with leading hardware wallet provider Ledger and expanded its Magic Eden Wallet to mobile devices.
During the period, Exodus also launched Passkeys for developers, making it easier for dApps to onboard users with a frictionless wallet experience. Richardson noted:
“By removing the barriers and complexities of owning digital assets. We’re helping the everyday consumer take part in the fast-growing digital asset market.”
Conclusion
Exodus is heading to NYSE American. Leaving the OTC market behind signals one thing: an upgrade. Greater visibility. Enhanced liquidity. Easier access for institutional investors.
This moment didn’t happen overnight, though. Exodus has been building for years — tokenizing shares in 2021, breaking trading volume records in 2024, growing a loyal user base, and strengthening its treasury.
Now, with Bitcoin smashing all-time highs and the crypto market surging, the timing couldn’t be better. Exodus is all set to lead as crypto moves further into the mainstream.
