The deal, announced Tuesday (Oct. 21), is the latest in a string of acquisitions for the U.S.’s largest exchange. This comes amid a more friendly regulatory environment for digital assets.
“The ‘why’ is simple,” Coinbase wrote on its blog. “We want to create more accessible, efficient, and transparent capital markets. But today, founders often struggle to raise capital. Also, individual investors don’t have the opportunity to invest in private token sales.”
Echo, the post continued, solves this by letting projects raise directly from their community. This can be either via a private sale or by self-hosting a public token sale using its Sonar platform.
“Integrating Echo’s tools will help us enable more direct community participation, joining projects with capital, entirely on-chain,” Coinbase added. “While we’ll start with crypto token sales via Sonar, we plan to expand support to tokenized securities and real-world assets over time, leveraging Echo’s infrastructure. We join projects with capital, entirely on-chain.”
The blog post notes that Echo has so far helped projects raise more than $200 million over the course of around 300 completed deals since launching. Sonar “has also seen early success, helping power Plasma’s XPL token sale,” Coinbase added.
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Coinbase’s other recent acquisitions include a deal in July to purchase Liquifi, a platform used by digital asset firms to manage token ownership. It also includes its landmark $2.9 billion acquisition of crypto derivatives exchange Deribit in May.
The company, along with Mastercard, is also reportedly looking to acquire BVNK, a London-based FinTech company specializing in stablecoin payment infrastructure. This deal could value BVNK between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion, per a recent Fortune report.
Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke last week with Mark Troianovski, director and head of product partnerships at Coinbase, in the wake of his company’s collaboration with Samsung to bring the Coinbase One membership program into the Samsung Wallet app for U.S. users.
As that report noted, this is a movement away from the old model of crypto adoption, in which users had to download an exchange app, memorize seed phrases, and deal with the volatility of trading tokens.
“It’s really all about meeting our users where they are,” Troianovski said. “People have come to expect their phones to be a place to store payment credentials, for digital wallets to serve as a kind of financial hub.”
