Coinbase acquires trade execution firm Routefire

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) has acquired the San Francisco-based trade execution startup Routefire; Routefire helps institutional investors fill large orders at fast speeds for low costs.

Routefire unveiled the acquisition via a blog post, saying that, 

While we’ll no longer be supporting the Routefire platform, we are very excited to continue on our mission of bringing advanced trading infrastructure to the rapidly developing cryptocurrency markets by joining Coinbase.

This is Coinbase’s first acquisition of 2020. 

Will Routefire help prevent Coinbase outages?

Due to the increase in popularity that digital currency markets have been experiencing over the last few weeks, Coinbase has had trouble staying online 100% of the time. The volume that has been flowing through the platform seems to be too much for it to handle, and as a result, Coinbase has experienced a number of outages at times that most digital currency traders and investors would consider crucial.

However, Coinbase may have acquired RouteFire in hopes that the trade execution firm can solve some of the issues that stem from the transaction volume created by traders.

Coinbase is going public

Coinbase’s acquisition of Routefire also builds the company’s balance sheet ahead of its initial public offering. In July of 2020, rumors began circulating that Coinbase was looking to become a publicly-traded company, and in December of 2020, Coinbase finally confirmed those rumors. Coinbase is expected to go public with a valuation of roughly $8 billion, which will make the Coinbase IPO one of the largest and first to take place in 2021.

But Coinbase is not the only digital currency service provider that is looking to go public this year. Today, it was revealed that Bakkt is in advanced talks to go public through a merger with blank-check firm VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings ($VIH) and is expected to be valued at around $2 billion once the merger is complete.