Citing three sources familiar with the situation, Business Insider reports that the deal to acquire Bitstamp, the oldest surviving Bitcoin exchange, is already in its final stages. The new owner of the site will be the South Korean gaming company Nexon, whose headquarters are now located in Japan.
Bitstamp was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Luxembourg, after Chinese repression became the oldest surviving crypto exchange. The platform has a 24-hour trading volume of $500 million, making it the tenth largest exchange in the world.
Nexon, which released its first game in 1995, is now worth an estimated $13 billion. The company has been developing Korean and Japanese versions of well-known games, including Counter Strike and FIFA Online. Neither Nexon nor Bitstamp representatives have made any public comments on this matter, but there are rumors that the gaming company will pay $350 million for the crypto exchange, which is the only one licensed in Europe at the moment. If so, the exchanger will be sold for $50 million cheaper than Poloniex exchanger was sold to Circle earlier this year. The companies reportedly struck a deal worth $400 million. This is strange because Bitstamp outperforms Poloniex in trading volume on a daily basis and, unlike Poloniex, has the banking relationships needed to offer fiat trading pairs.
However, these changes will undoubtedly bring excellent returns to Bitstamp investors. In 2013, hedge fund Pantera Capital provided the platform with $10 million in seed capital, and in 2017 the company raised another $2.4 million through a crowdfunding campaign.
Notably, this will not be the first crypto exchange acquired by Nexon. According to CCN, the company bought a controlling stake in the South Korean crypto exchange Korbit at a price of $150 million. At that time, Korbit was the second largest crypto exchange in the country, and currently has a daily trading volume of approximately $100 million.
According to https://www.ccn.com
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