Coinbase Strikes Deal to Buyout Earn.com at $120 million
During the crypto craze of 2017, the U.S-based largest cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase had a phenomenal year clocking billion dollar revenues and currently serves the largest number of registered users to its platform.
The crypto exchange is now seen expanding its operations to other crypto and blockchain-related services. Earlier this month, the crypto exchange also announced support for Bitcoin Forks along with the launch of ‘Coinbase Ventures’ to fund early-stage startups in the cryptocurrency space.
In yet another cryptocurrency venture, Coinbase has officially announced the purchase of Earn.com a blockchain-based platform that allows users to send and receive digital currencies for replying to emails and completing similar tasks.
Although the terms of the deal have not been made public, TechCrunch reports that it could have been possibly above $120 million. Commenting on this news, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said: “We’re going to be doubling down on the Earn business within Coinbase, as they have built a paid email product that is arguably one of the earliest practical blockchain applications to achieve meaningful traction.”
As a part of the acquisition deal, Earn CEO and co-founder, Balaji Srinivasan will be joining Coinbase as the company’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO). In the official blog post by Coinbase, Armstrong says: "Balaji has become one of the most respected technologists in the crypto field and is considered one of the technology industry's few true originalists.”
He further added that “As CTO of Coinbase, Balaji will serve an important role as the technological evangelist for the company. Balaji will evangelize for both crypto and for Coinbase, educating the world and recruiting crypto-first talent to the company.”
Srinivasan seems to be a lot happy with deal knowing the fact that Earn.com has been struggling with some financial issues in the past. He said: “With Coinbase’s user base and distribution muscle, I think it could hit $100 million in ARR in a few months. I’m proud of the fact that we turned what could have been a disaster into a successful product and I’m excited about the road ahead.”
However, Earn has explained to its users that it won’t be changing anything just yet. The team at Earn has ensured that with this deal, the product will just turn out to be “bigger and better”.
The team wrote that “everything will continue as before in the short term, with one exception: we’ve put our token launch on the back burner and will instead focus on integrating with Coinbase’s infrastructure and scaling up our service. You might be able to guess what this will enable, but stay tuned anyway as you might be surprised!”
This is Coinbase’s second acquisition in the recent times. It is just last Friday, that Coinbase announced the acquisition of a mobile Ethereum wallet called ‘Cipher Browser’ that allows users to gain access to decentralized applications (DAPPs).