Binance Is About to Buy CoinMarketCap In A Deal Worth $400 Million

Binance is in the final stages of talks to acquire CoinMarketCap.

Sources familiar with the matter said that the crypto exchange plans to pay $400 million for the deal.

The cash-and-stock deal is expected to be announced this week. When completed, it would be one of the largest acquisitions in the crypto space.

Earlier this year, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said that there are two acquisitions on their schedule that he is “very excited” about. These are “major” and will have a “significant impact,” CZ said at the time. The CoinMarketCap deal may be one of those two deals.

Interestingly, CoinMarketCap has not collected any external funding to date and is “entirely bootstrapped,” as said Carylyne Chan, chief strategy officer of CoinMarketCap. “We don’t plan to raise any funds soon; we can still continue bootstrapping and scaling at this point,” Chan said at the time.

CoinMarketCap is the most well-known crypto data aggregator, with 207.2 million visitors in the past 6 months, according to SimilarWeb. Binance managed to attract 113.8 million visitors within the same timeframe. CoinMarketCap’s traffic is 80% larger than that of Binance’s.

Sources close to the matter said that CoinMarketCap’s ability to generate a massive amount of traffic is one of major reasons for the acquisition. CoinMarketCap was created in 2013 by the anonymous Brandon Chez in Delaware, U.S.

However, Binance is the most popular crypto exchange with roughly 22% traffic share. It is in a neck-and-neck competition with Coinbase which accounts for 21%.

Binance has been on a buying spree. It acquired at least nine firms last year, but not all of them were announced publicly. Some of them are wallet provider Trust Wallet, blockchain data startup DappReview; Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX and little-known Seychelles-based derivatives platform JEX.

In general, the largest crypto deals today include Circle’s acquisition of Poloniex for $400 million; Bitstamp’s acquisition by Belgium-based investment firm NXMH for around $400 million; Coinbase’s acquisition of Earn.com for $120 million; and Kraken’s acquisition of Crypto Facilities for $100 million in 2019, among others.