Coinbase has acquired Echo, an onchain platform supporting communities to invest together and offering founders more options for their capitalisation table.
The companies have a shared vision to democratise early-stage investing so that more people can support the next generation of breakthrough companies. Through the move, valued at USD 375 million, Coinbase wants to create more accessible and transparent capital markets.
Expanding into fundraising
Founded by Cobie, a crypto firm and advocate for community-driven investing, Echo created tools that make fundraising more inclusive, transparent, and efficient. Currently, founders struggle to raise capital, and individual investors don’t have the opportunity to invest in private token sales. Echo aims to solve this issue by having projects raised from their community through a private sale or by self-hosting a public token sale using Sonar, its new self-hosted public token sale product.
By integrating Echo’s tools, Coinbase aims to enable more direct community participation, joining projects with capital, entirely onchain. The company will begin with token sales via Sonar, and plans to expand support to tokenised securities and real-world assets over time, leveraging Echo’s infrastructure.
Echo’s efforts to open up private markets and help projects raise funds, together with Sonar, helped power Plasma’s XPL token sale. The acquisition will help build a full-stack solution for crypto projects and investors, covering launch, fundraising, secondary trading, and more. For builders, this means easier access to capital and community-aligned fundraising tools such as Echo for private investment groups and Sonar for self-hosted public token sales. Investors can benefit from new opportunities that were previously not possible, through Echo’s platform or through direct offerings with Sonar. The onchain economy leverages a more efficient, globally accessible, and transparent capital market that drives innovation and growth.
Echo adds to Coinbase’s recent acquisition of Liquifi, improving token creation and cap table management for early-stage teams. Liquifi optimised the company’s ability to help builders at the start of the process, and Echo extends this support into fundraising. Together with pre-existing features in exchange listings, custody, staking, trading, and financing, Coinbase can fully and directly help token issuers and investors.
