Leading United States’ crypto exchange Coinbase has decided to sidetrack its subsidiary Earn.com to expand the Coinbase Earn program.
First reported by The Block on Monday, the decision was propagated among the clients of the exchange via an email that mentioned Coinbase would be “sunsetting Earn.com to focus exclusively on Coinbase Earn.”
“[Coinbase will start] scaling Coinbase Earn even further by adding more campaigns to the platform, to connect more Blockchain networks with engaged crypto users,” the exchange stated.
A major acquisition in the crypto industry
This step is massive in the part of the California-headquartered exchange as it acquired Earn.com in April last year for an amount of $100 million. The acquisition was seen by many as a step only to tap the co-founder and chief of the platform, Balaji Srinivasan, as its chief technology officer.
Amid the acquisition, the exchange valued itself at $8 billion, jumping from $1.8 billion.
Founded in 2013, Earn.com originally was developing chips and hardware for cryptocurrency mining. The startup had rebranded in 2017 from 21.co with the launch of its eponymous paid messaging platform, which allows senders to pay users in cryptocurrency to reply to emails and complete tasks.
Coinbase Earn is also a similar platform to Earn.com; the only difference is the platform is integrated within the exchange’s ecosystem, while for Earn.com, users need to be redirected to a separate domain. Coinbase claims that it “has allowed nearly a million unique users in 115+ countries to earn their share of hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto.”
Per the announcement by the exchange, Earn.com users have to withdraw any funds on the platform by February 20 next year.
Meanwhile, the crypto exchange recently denied the rumors of its acquisition of US-based Prime Broker Tagomi.
