Popular crypto trading site Coinbase announced today that it has made its first major acquisition, purchasing Earn.com for a reported $100 million.
Based on its announcement, it’s clear that big part of Coinbase’s motivation for the deal was the acquisition of Balaji Srinivasan, who was Earn.com’s CEO and is now Coinbase CTO. In this new role, Srinivasan (whose resume includes a PhD, two Masters degrees, and a stint as a General Partner at famed VC firm Andreessen Horowitz) will “evangelize for both crypto and for Coinbase, educating the world and recruiting crypto-first talent to the company,” according to the announcement.
Coinbase may be most excited about Srinivasan – his name dominates the first three paragraphs of Coinbase’s official announcement – but the rest of the Earn.com team is joining Coinbase too, and will continue to operate its crypto-friendly microtask platform. Earn.com says that its immediate development priorities are scaling and integrating with the Coinbase platform, so it’s likely that additional crypto features are coming to its service further down the line.
Earn.com, if you’re not familiar with it, is a microtask platform where users get small financial rewards (in fiat or crypto) in return for completing short tasks like replying to emails. Through its users, Earn.com offers clients incredibly high response rates (30-70%), making it a valuable platform on which to do things like conduct user research or surveys.
Coinbase must have big plans for both Earn.com and Srinivasan. At “near $100 million,” the acquisition cost as much as Coinbase raised in its most recent round of funding, an August 2017 series D round that catapulted it to “unicorn” status, making it the first crypto unicorn.
(A “unicorn” is any tech startup that’s valued at more than $1 billion either by valuation or by market cap if the company has listed publicly).
More Acquisitions to Come?
This probably isn’t the last acquisition we’ll see from Coinbase, though. The company should have plenty in the warchest both from previous funding rounds and from its fast-growing popularity with users, and just last month it hired merger and acquisition expert Emilie Choi away from LinkedIn. Choi oversaw more than 40 M&A deals while at LinkedIn; it’s unlikely that Coinbase brought her in solely to oversee this one deal.
