The media and event platform Cryptocurrency CoinDesk, which owns the news service, announced on Tuesday that it is buying TradeBlock, the world’s leading crypto index provider.
With the acquisition, CoinDesk said it was positioned to be the leading source of crypto news, information and data for the fast-growing sector, experiencing a flood of interest and investment from financial firms. In the just-concluded year, the price of bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency, has risen by more than 300%, driven mainly by institutional investors.
“We will be the crypto-investors’ destination for unified media, opportunities, research, pricing and data,” CoinDesk CEO Kevin Worth said in a statement.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
The entire TradeBlock team will remain with the company, which will operate independently of the media operations to maintain TradeBlock’s commitment to data security and confidentiality and the integrity of CoinDesk’s journalism.
More than $ 20 billion in investment products use TradeBlock indices and $ 1 billion in monthly trading volume is quoted against it, CoinDesk said. The largest user of TradeBlock’s XBX index is Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, the largest exchange-traded crypto-financial product, the media company said. Grayscale is owned by Digital Currency Group, the parent company of CoinDesk. DCG previously had a minority stake in TradeBlock.
Michael Casey, CoinDesk’s chief content officer, wrote in a blog post on Medium that the deal fits within a long tradition of news organizations serving as guardians and curators of major financial indices, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the FTSE 100 of the Financial Times. and Nikkei’s Nikkei 225.
“Such outlets are ideal for promoting confidence in the integrity of the numbers,” Casey wrote. ‘Wall Street is coming. This will charge reliable prices. ”