Coinbase: Why did we spend $400 million to acquire Echo?

Coinbase acquires Echo, an on-chain fundraising platform, and is committed to building a more open and transparent capital market to allow more people to participate in early-stage innovative investments. This article is derived from the article "Coinbase acquires Echo: Unlocking the future of onchain capital formation" written by Shan Aggarwal, Chief Commercial Officer of Coinbase, and compiled by Dongqu.
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Coinbase is valued at approximately 375M USD Acquired Echo, a leading on-chain fundraising platform. Echo’s platform makes it easier for community members to participate in fundraising and investment, whether through private placements through Echo or self-service public offerings using Sonar. Working together, the two parties will make it easier for companies to raise funds and grow, and also allow the community to have earlier access to unique investment opportunities.

Coinbase has acquired Echo, an on-chain platform that helps the community invest together and provides entrepreneurs with more equity and token holder allocation options. Like us, Echo believes that early-stage investing should be democratized, allowing more people to support the next generation of breakthrough companies. Echo was founded by Cobie, a crypto OG and long-time advocate for community-driven investing, and has pioneered tools to make fundraising more inclusive, transparent, and efficient.

Our "why" is simple: to create a more accessible, efficient and transparent capital market. The current situation is that entrepreneurs often face difficulties in raising funds, and individual investors rarely have the opportunity to participate in private equity token sales.

Echo’s solution is to allow projects to raise funds directly from their community—either through a private sale or using Sonar to self-host a public token sale. Integrating Echo's tools will enable us to promote more direct community participation on the chain and efficiently connect projects and capital. We will initially start with encrypted token sales using Sonar, and will rely on Echo's infrastructure to expand to tokenized securities and physical assets in the future.

Since its launch, Echo has made progress in the open private market, helping projects raise more than $200M and completing approximately 300 transactions. There are also early results for its new self-service public token sale product, Sonar, which powered Plasma’s XPL token sale.

Through this merger and acquisition, we are creating a complete set of solutions covering issuance, fundraising, and secondary transactions to serve encryption projects and investors.

• For builders: Easier access to capital and community-aligned fundraising tools, such as Echo (private equity investment groups) and Sonar (self-service public token sales)
• For investors: Access differentiated opportunities that were difficult to reach in the past through trusted platforms such as Echo, or through direct supply from Sonar
• To the on-chain economy: A more efficient, transparent, globally accessible capital market to drive innovation and growth

Echo complements our recent acquisition of Liquifi, which simplifies token issuance and holder management for early-stage teams. Liquifi enhanced our early-stage support, and Echo extends that support into the fundraising phase. Combined with our existing strengths in exchange listing, custody, staking, trading and financing, we can now support token issuers and investors throughout the entire life cycle - from issuance to fundraising to secondary markets.

Coinbase is a gathering platform for users, liquidity and trust. Expanding into the fundraising process can further eliminate resistance, empower builders and investors, and promote the growth of the overall ecosystem.

Note:
[1] Coinbase acquired Echo on 2025/10/20 for approximately US$375M. The transaction consisted of cash and stocks, and price adjustments were made as usual.