Bitcoin mergers and acquisitions are heating up. Digital Currency Group bought CoinDesk last week. DCG was already an investor in CoinDesk, which probably made the acquisition a logical next step towards fulfilling its mission. DCG states that their “mission is to help build the foundation for the blockchain industry”, and CoinDesk is one of the central pieces in blockchain information and analysis. The big upside is combining CoinDesk’s knowledge and abilities with DCG’s capacity.
DCG has also gone out of its way to keep CoinDesk’s independence. CoinDesk will even be housed in a different building than DCG. This is a very important step given CoinDesk’s prominence as one of the main sources of information in the world of cryptocurrency. The Crunch reports that the price of the deal was between $500,000 and $600,000 USD. The Crunch also reports that CoinDesk was trying to find a buyer for quite some time and it had aimed for a price tag in the $800,000 to $1 million range.
Some Bitcoin users might find it rather unusual for such a publication to be sold in USD and not in Bitcoin or a mixture of cryptocurrencies, that is, if the deal was in fact done using fiat. Maybe that gives us a glimpse on what the parties involved think about the future of Bitcoin. To be fair, DCG has expressly declared its interest in blockchain, but not necessarily in Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency for that matter.
Certainly 2015 was a year in which interest in FinTech in general, and blockchain technology in particular, grew the most. Many in the financial sector are positioning themselves as organizations at the vanguard of blockchain, and probably have never been interested in Bitcoin beyond the blockchain. DCG certainly seems to be surfing the blockchain tide rather than the Bitcoin one. This strengthens the reasoning behind their move to keep CoinDesk’s independence.
This is also probably the reason why the deal has attracted so much attention from mainstream media. Reuters reported on the acquisition and Forbes ran a fully-fledged piece. That is a lot of buzz for a deal priced at around half a million dollars. In any case, we hope that CoinDesk will keep playing the role it has played so far in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency scenes. Its analysis and tutorials, as well as its well-researched articles are an asset to cryptocurrency enthusiasts all over. This is definitely a sector that needs as many reliable information outlets as it can get.
