The transaction – the crypto sphere’s largest of the year – positions Coinbase to boost its international foothold and diversify its trading revenue
Coinbase has agreed to acquire Dubai-based crypto options exchange Deribit in a $2.9 billion deal set to close by the end of this year, the companies announced Thursday.
The deal aims to expand Coinbase’s international foothold: Deribit controls roughly 85% of the global crypto options market, according to CoinDesk – and reported $1.2 trillion in trading volume last year, a 95% jump over 2023. About 20% of Coinbase’s revenue now originates overseas.
The acquisition breaks down to a $700 million cash offer, alongside 11 million shares of Coinbase Class A common stock. The company’s shares saw a 6.6% jump in value on the market Thursday after the deal announcement.
“We’re excited to join forces with Coinbase to power a new era in global crypto derivatives,” Deribit CEO Luuk Strijers said in a statement Thursday. “As the leading crypto options platform, we’ve built a strong, profitable business, and this acquisition will accelerate the foundation we laid while providing traders with even more opportunities across spot, futures, perpetuals, and options – all under one trusted brand.”
The deal ranks as the crypto sphere’s largest of 2025 – a year already rife with several high-profile combinations. Ripple last month said it would buy prime brokerage firm Hidden Road for $1.25 billion. Kraken in March opted to acquire futures platform NinjaTrader in a deal worth $1.5 billion.
Kraken had been in talks to buy Deribit for months, CoinDesk reported. Now it appears Coinbase has won out.
The deal aims to “add diversity and durability” to Coinbase’s trading revenues, Greg Tusar, the company’s vice president of institutional product, said in a blog post Thursday.
“We believe crypto options are on the cusp of significant expansion, similar to the equity options boom of the 1990s,” Tusar said.
Options give traders the right to buy or sell an asset at a predetermined price by a specific time but don’t require them to execute the trade. That helps in hedging risks.
The crypto sphere writ large appears to be betting on the U.S. as a massive growth catalyst. Last week, for example, U.K.-based crypto lender Nexo announced its reentry in the U.S. market after two years away. The swarm for U.S. assets comes after Donald Trump’s reelection as president. On the campaign trail, Trump called for the U.S. to become “crypto capital of the planet” and pledged that Biden-era “persecution” of crypto firms – largely through an aggressive enforcement campaign by the Securities and Exchange Commission – would end.
While Trump’s second term has proved a boon for the value of bitcoin, Coinbase in particular has seen its share price drop 33.5% from a peak during the first week of the new administration.
Once the Coinbase deal closes, Deribit founders John and Marius Jansen will step away from the firm they launched roughly a decade ago, according to a post on Deribit’s website.
Integrating Deribit’s technology with Coinbase’s products will enable “more efficient onboarding, enhanced fiat rails, and capital efficiency across the entire trading lifecycle,” Deribit said.
For Coinbase, however, the Deribit purchase “might be the best ‘value’ deal in crypto I’ve ever seen,” Jeff Park, Bitwise’s head of alpha strategies, wrote in a Thursday post on the social media site X, calling the combination “a coup for Coinbase.”
“This isn’t just another addition,” Tusar said in a nod to several of Coinbase’s previous acquisitions, including Xapo and One River Digital. “It’s foundational to our vision of creating the most comprehensive, compliant, and user-friendly derivatives platform globally.”
Source: Cointelegraph
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