San Francisco-based Startup Blockspring: Coinbase’s New Acquisition
The largest US-based crypto exchange Coinbase is in no mood to stop its rush of expansion and development, considering its recent acquisition. The famous exchange platform and wallet provider has acquired a tech startup named Blockspring.
Blockspring, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz develops tools for collecting and managing data from APIs. It allows the developers to automatically gather and process information from application programming interfaces (APIs). The startup raised $3.4 million in a funding round In 2015, which was carried out by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and seed-stage investment firm SV Angel. The firm also had support from venture fund Y Combinator.
Additionally, in Blockspring’s 2015 funding announcement, Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan talked about the startup noting, “Blockspring turns a company’s business users into an army of engineers able to quickly and easily connect spreadsheets and other applications to web services without any coding experience.”
The buyout was declared by Blockspring via a blog this week. The blog notes, “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.” Also, a Coinbase spokesperson has confirmed the acquisition. Though, he declined to give any further details.
Notably, Blockspring will operate as an independent entity even after the acquisition. Also, the firm’s products will continue to operate for current and new customers. Recently, Blockspring had provided integration for Coinbase into its service.
Blockspring is Coinbase’ 11th acquisition. Back in August, the exchange platform took San Francisco-based startup Distributed Systems Inc under its roof. The startup works on decentralized identity solutions. Coinbase’ purpose behind the new acquisition is to work toward a decentralized identity system that will “let you prove that you own identity, or that you have a relationship with the Social Security Administration, without making a copy of that identity.”
Most of the acquisitions of Coinbase have been ‘talent grabs.’ Apart from buying up firms, Coinbase also makes investments through its early-stage focused Coinbase Ventures fund.
Remarkably, Coinbase raised a whopping $300 million in October 2018. The exchange is currently positioned as 39th largest exchange in the world, has around $68 million in daily trade volume.
