Today, Friday 30 April, the exchange Coinbase announced that it has acquired the data analytics platform Skew for a sum that has not yet been revealed. This sum could be revealed at the end of the second quarter of 2021, so within two months.
This is the first acquisition since Coinbase went public with a sort of IPO on 14 April.
Why did Coinbase acquire Skew
The data processed by Skew will be used to feed into the Coinbase Prime platform to provide traders with all the data on Bitcoin in terms of volumes, volatility, and so on.
The platform is aimed at a purely institutional investor audience, according to a blog post released today by Coinbase.
“Through this acquisition, Coinbase reinforces our commitment to serving the growing institutional market. We know that access to high-quality data is essential for institutions assessing investments in crypto assets”.
This was explained by Greg Tusar, Vice President of Institutional Investor Products at Coinbase.
Skew had already decided to acquire several companies such as the Tagomi trading platform, which was valued at $77.2 million, and Bison Trails, and may soon announce that it has bought Routefire, an infrastructure that supports automated cryptocurrency trading.
Skew has over 100 institutional clients such as One River Asset Management, Susquehanna International Group, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.
Coinbase and PayPal
Also today Coinbase kicked off purchases with PayPal, allowing the two accounts to be linked to pay for cryptocurrency purchases and also withdraw. With this new payment method on Coinbase, purchases can be made up to a maximum of $25,000 per day.
For the time being, however, the service is only active in the United States of America and there is no news on when it might be available for European customers as well.
Recently, Coinbase had also decided to list the stablecoin Tether, after the latter became even more transparent.
In addition, the IPO has generated a surge in online searches for Coinbase, with 1,420,000 searches per month, or 45,805 searches per day in America.
