The growth of bitcoin ecosystem has led to the creation of hundreds of digital currency based start-ups. While few of these start-ups went on to make it big, others are either getting acquired or shut down.
As the successful ones grow bigger, they look forward to acquire smaller start-ups working in their area of interest. Acquisitions makes it easier for them to expand their business and reduce the time and effort required to build it from scratch.
There were talks about possible acquisition of one of the Singaporean exchanges — Coin Republic by an international player. It tuns out that these rumours had some truth in it. The founder of Coin Republic, David Moskowitz has recently acknowledged that the company is indeed looking into the possibility of getting acquired by a non-Singaporean company. David mentioned that he is in talks with multiple firms and received expressions of interest from few more in this regard.
Coin Republic has been offering bitcoin exchange service along with educational resources on bitcoin and its advantages since 2013. Unlike other exchanges, Coin republic charged a fixed transaction fee of 1.9 percent per transaction. Even though Coin Republic’s transaction fee is higher than that of many exchanges, the company maintains that it doesn’t have any hidden spreads on trades like other exchanges and they have a transparent flat fee.
Coin Republic is a Bring Your Own Wallet (BYOW) exchange that doesn’t hold on to customer’s funds or bitcoins. Bitcoins bought on the platform will be directly forwarded to the user specified wallet. By using the BYOW concept, Coin Republic reduces the security risks arising from cyber-attacks.
While David didn’t divulge anything more about the parties interested in acquiring Coin Republic, we can expect companies interested in expanding its presence in Singapore and Asia Pacific to not miss out on this opportunity.