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Coinbase Acquires Routefire to Beef Up Institutional Bitcoin Offering

Leading U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase has acquired trade execution startup Routefire. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong

Leading U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase has acquired trade execution startup Routefire. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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"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," Routefire wrote in a blog post Thursday, adding:

"We remain deeply committed to this ecosystem and are excited to help develop Coinbase’s market-leading suite of institutional products, which provides the true end-to-end solution that we believe best meets our customers' needs."

A Coinbase spokesman confirmed the deal but declined to comment.

Additional resources in the trading infrastructure realm couldn't come soon enough for the San Francisco-based crypto exchange. Coinbase has seen intermittent outages in recent days as bitcoin has surged to unprecedented highs currently near $40,000 per coin.

It is Coinbase's first acquisition of the new year, albeit likely a small one. The website of the San Francisco-based Routefire shows a team of seven led by CEO Jason Victor.

In 2020, Coinbase's acquisition of crypto prime broker Tagomi helped the exchange execute mega bitcoin buys for MicroStrategy, One River Digital and potentially others.

See also: Coinbase Brokered MicroStrategy’s $425M Bitcoin Purchase, Exchange Says

As institutional interest in bitcoin as "digital gold" continues to ramp up, other firms have sought to strengthen their prime brokerage offerings. Prime brokerage refers to a suite of services tailored to the needs of deep-pocketed investors.

Zack Seward

Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Zack Seward