Coinbase Resumes Spending Spree With Blockspring Acquisition

Coinbase Resumes Spending Spree With Blockspring Acquisition

Coinbase has made its first acquisition for the year. In a deal announced on January 17th (albeit not by Coinbase itself), the exchange giant acquired Blockspring, a data collection startup based in California.

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Coinbase Seeking Blockspring Talent, Likely to Let Them Be

The San Francisco-based startup will remain operating as an independent company. Under the Coinbase umbrella, the company should see its expansion hopes rise with the extra liquidity its new parent company will offer. As CEO Paul Katsen said in a statement reported on the company’s blog page:

“Joining Coinbase was a no-brainer for a number of reasons including its commitment to establishing an open financial system and the strength of its engineering team, led by Tim Wagner (formerly of AWS Lambda). Making the technical simple and accessible is what we’ve always been about at Blockspring. And now we’ll get to push these goals forward along with the talented folks at Coinbase to make something greater than we could on our own.”

Coinbase Expansion Resumes

Coinbase went on a spending spree in the middle of last year. Between April and August of 2018 the exchange acquired Earn.com, trading platform Paradex, Keystone Capital Corp, and Distributed Systems, a digital identity startup.

The acquisitions came among its own restructuring in May, wherein it splintered itself into a simple exchange/wallet “Coinbase”, with the addition of a “Pro” site and a “Prime” exchange for institutional investors. It also added a custody solution.

At the end of the year it announced the intention to support 31 additional currencies. According to Tim Wagner, Blockspring will help Coinbase expand its developer tools:

Excited to share that the @Blockspring team is joining Coinbase to help build out our developer tools. They’ve built an impressive platform that connects hundreds of different APIs and we’re excited for them to continue their work here at Coinbase!

— Tim Wagner (@timallenwagner) January 16, 2019

Coinbase’s Hunger For Growth Unabated

It may be a new year, but Coinbase’s aggressive expansion activities do not appear to have slowed. Originally a consumer-facing exchange, the company seems to be increasingly pivoting toward the institutional market, as well as shoring up its technical capabilities.

Have your say. Does the acquisition of Blockspring change the landscape for Coinbase or its competitors?

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