Coinbase’s agreement to buy Deribit highlights the increasing importance of financial derivatives for cryptocurrency exchanges, according to industry executives.
On May 8, Coinbase, the US’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, agreed to acquire crypto derivatives platform Deribit for $2.9 billion in the crypto industry’s largest corporate acquisition to date.
The deal reflects increasing competition among digital asset exchanges and brokerages — including Coinbase, Kraken and Robinhood — to dominate the burgeoning crypto derivatives market.
“Global derivatives trading is a key driver of growth for Coinbase,” Spencer Yang, co-founder of Fractal Bitcoin, a Bitcoin scaling solution, told Cointelegraph.
Coinbase agreed to buy Deribit on May 8. Source: Coinbase
The merger established Coinbase as the world’s largest crypto derivatives platform by open interest, the exchange said in a blog post announcing the deal.
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