Coinbase to acquire leading blockchain infrastructure platform, Bison Trails

Posted on by
  • The acquisition will enable Bison Trails to accelerate its mission to provide easy-to-use blockchain infrastructure that strengthens the entire crypto ecosystem.
  • Bison Trails will serve as a foundational element within Coinbase’s ecosystem suite of products, powering all participants in the cryptoeconomy.

Crypto has come a long way since Satoshi’s whitepaper. At Coinbase we believe we are just starting to see a glimpse for the potential of the emerging cryptoeconomy. One of the biggest challenges for builders in the crypto ecosystem today is running reliable, secure and scalable blockchain infrastructure.

Coinbase is committed to providing best-in-class infrastructure to empower current and future builders of the cryptoeconomy. Similar to how in the traditional Web paradigm, reliable managed infrastructure unleashed a wave of innovation, our strategy is to offer turn-key solutions to power distributed and scalable crypto infrastructure, enabling the innovators and builders of tomorrow to do what they do best: build. This will help drive one of the greatest transformations in finance in the last hundred years, and will drive us closer to achieving our mission of creating an open financial system.

It’s for this reason and many more that Coinbase is proud to announce today that we are acquiring Bison Trails, an early pioneer in fully managed blockchain infrastructure whose platform has helped to accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology around the world. Its easy-to-use platform powers billions of transactions for many of the biggest names in crypto today. By joining forces, we aim to bring the advanced technology that the Bison Trails team has developed — and continues to develop — to more projects and more companies around the world. Bison Trails will continue to operate as a standalone product and provide world class services to its current customers, which include some of the most respected names in crypto and financial technology.

Founded in 2018, Bison Trails’ mission is to provide superior infrastructure on multiple blockchains, to strengthen the entire ecosystem, and enable the pioneers of tomorrow. With its Participation product, Bison Trails powers staking and active network participation on ~20 crypto protocols. Bison Trails’ Query/Transact (QT) product makes it easy for anyone building a wide range of Web 3.0 applications to validate transactions, obtain information about them (query), and write data such as transfers or smart contract interactions (transactions).

Bison Trails will continue to build on its current offerings as a foundational element of Coinbase’s ecosystem suite of products. Over time, we plan to extend additional infrastructure and API services that we have developed to power Coinbase products for the benefit of the entire crypto ecosystem.

The Coinbase and Bison Trails relationship started early, with an investment from Coinbase Ventures in late 2019 and commercial partnership with Coinbase Custody in 2020. As we developed a strong working relationship, it became increasingly clear that Coinbase and Bison Tralis have a shared vision of providing best-in-class infrastructure to power the cryptoeconomy. We’ve been impressed with the team’s speed of execution, customer empathy, and pioneering leadership. We are incredibly excited for the Bison Trails herd to join Coinbase.

Our acquisition of Bison Trails represents an important step in delivering on our mission to create an open financial system for the world. In the same way that we simplified access to the cryptoeconomy for individuals and institutions, we will continue developing a suite of products and services to help other companies build protocols and applications, helping to grow the cryptoconomy overall.

This acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close later this year.

Coinbase to acquire leading blockchain infrastructure platform, Bison Trails was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.