Crypto exchange Coinbase has announced the acquisition of Echo, an onchain investment platform for raising capital. The transaction value was about $375 million.
As a result of the acquisition, Coinbase plans to create a full-fledged infrastructure for onchain financing, which will allow companies to attract investments directly from the community and users to access previously closed early investment opportunities.
“We want to create more accessible, efficient, and transparent capital markets. […] Echo solves this by allowing projects to raise directly from their community, either through a private sale or by self-hosting a public token sale using Sonar,” Coinbase said.
According to the statement, Echo, founded by well-known crypto enthusiast Cobie, has become one of the most prominent startups developing decentralized investment and fundraising tools. Its platform allows project teams to raise capital through both private rounds and public token sales, which projects can conduct independently through the Sonar tool.
According to Coinbase, since its launch, Echo has helped projects raise more than $200 million in more than 300 deals. Sonar has already become a popular solution for standalone public token sales, including selling the Plasma project’s XLR token.
It is worth noting that a special section on the Incrypted website provides information about current and future token sales.
“Echo has pioneered tools that make fundraising more inclusive, transparent, and efficient. Echo believes in democratizing early-stage investing,” the company said.
Coinbase plans to integrate Echo’s tools into its ecosystem to provide a direct connection between projects and investors. Initially, the company will focus on token shares, but will eventually expand to tokenized securities and real-world assets (RWAs) using Echo’s infrastructure.
It is worth noting that Echo will complement Coinbase’s recent acquisition of Liquifi, a token creation and captive management company for startups. While Liquifi supports teams at the startup stage, Echo expands opportunities at the capital raising stage.
Thus, Coinbase forms a full-fledged vertical for token issuers and investors — from token creation to public offering and secondary circulation.
“While Liquifi strengthened our ability to support builders at the start of their journey, Echo extends that support into fundraising. […] We’re now equipped to support token issuers and investors across the full lifecycle — from launch to fundraising to secondary markets,” the company said in an official statement.
According to the latter, the integration of Echo will create a new model of onchain financing, where
- Founders will get simplified access to capital and flexible fundraising tools
- Investors — access to unique early-stage deals through the proven Echo platform or standalone Sonar tokens
- The marketplace — a more transparent, global, and efficient ecosystem that fosters innovation and growth
Coinbase believes that this move will help remove barriers between projects and capital, uniting the community around a new era of decentralized finance.
As a reminder, in August 2025, Coinbase bought Deribit, the world’s largest crypto options trading platform, for $2.9 billion.