Coinbase has purchased angel investment platform Echo for approximately $375 million in cash and stock with the intention of building fundraising tools for its users, the cryptocurrency exchange said Tuesday.
Echo, which enables founders to raise funds directly from their community through either private sale or by self-hosting a public token sale, launched in March 2024 and has since helped projects raise $200 million over roughly 300 completed deals, according to a blog post on the acquisition.
With the acquisition, Coinbase said it’s building investment solutions into its platforms, including providing easier access to capital and community-aligned fundraising tools for founders and differentiated investment opportunities for investors.
“The ‘why’ is simple. We want to create more accessible, efficient, and transparent capital markets,” a Coinbase blog post said. “But today, founders often struggle to raise capital and individual investors don’t have the opportunity to invest in private token sales.”
Coinbase said the deal complements its July acquisition of token management platform LiquiFi.
“While Liquifi strengthened our ability to support builders at the start of their journey, Echo extends that support into fundraising,” the blog post said. “Combined with our existing strengths in exchange listings, custody, staking, trading, and financing, we’re now equipped to support token issuers and investors across the full lifecycle – from launch to fundraising to secondary markets.”
Aklil Ibssa, head of corporate development and M&A at Coinbase, said in an email to Banking Dive that Echo “helps us reimagine capital formation onchain: founders get more flexible ways to fund their projects, and communities can participate directly in the upside of what’s being built.”
Crypto market dealmaking has been on an intense upswing since the federal government’s regulatory about-face on crypto during President Donald Trump’s second term.
In May, Coinbase said it would pay $2.9 billion to buy options exchange Deribit in May, after announcing a deal with on-chain ad platform Spindl in January. Last week, Coinbase’s peer Kraken purchased derivatives platform Small Exchange from IG Group for $100 million, laying the groundwork to launch a fully U.S.-based derivatives product suite.
Ripple said it would buy prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion in April, Canadian stablecoin platform Rail for $200 million in August and corporate treasury manager GTreasury for $1 billion last week. Day trading fintech Robinhood, for its part, said it would buy Canadian crypto firm WonderFi for $179 million in May.
“A clear and positive regulatory environment in the U.S. gives companies the confidence to invest and grow with more certainty — and that includes M&A,” said Robert Moore, Kraken’s vice president of business expansion, in an email to Banking Dive last week. Moore said he expects “a lot more” deals in the next six to nine months as companies “look to capitalize on favorable conditions while the window is open.”
Jordan “Cobie” Fish, Echo’s founder, wrote on social media site X that he started Echo “in an attempt to try and change the market dynamics around crypto fundraising.”
“Today, we're joining Coinbase, but the mission stays the same,” he wrote. “We're gonna use the firepower of this behemoth to provide better opportunities to investors and better fundraising options to founders.”
He said that Echo was “just getting started.”
