Coinbase In Talks to Buy Bitcoin Startup Earn.com

[Acido213]

Coinbase may be on the verge of its biggest acquisition yet.

According to sources close to the situation, the San Francisco startup, which has raised more than $225 million in venture funding, is in talks to purchase Earn.com, which rebranded late last year from 21.co with the launch of its eponymous paid messaging platform.

One source with knowledge of the talks said Earn could be selling for more than $30 million, with the figure representing a low estimate of the terms discussed. (Earn.com has raised more than $120 million over multiple funding rounds since it was founded in 2013).

Still, Earn.com is said to be in talks with multiple parties about a potential acquisition, with one source indicating that the suitors were all "household names" in the industry.

While no deal has yet been struck, the news follows the March announcement that Coinbase had hired Emilie Choi, the former head of mergers and acquisition at LinkedIn, as its vice president of corporate and business development.

Earn.com CEO Balaji Srinivasan would potentially join Coinbase under the terms of the deal.

Coinbase did not respond to requests for comment at press time.

[Kakmakr]

Just another centralized service that gathers information about Bitcoin users. This site will get a vast amount of knowledge based on your responses to these surveys and also the people that you link up to. It also enables micro payments that generate a lot of transactions. <Coinbase just love sites that generate high volume transactions, linked to their platform, because it generate fees>

I can see the strategy behind this.