A deep dive into Coinbase's acquisition of Bison Trails

Episode 3 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro, Surojit Chatterjee, Chief Product Officer at Coinbase, and Joe Lallouz, CEO and co-founder at Bison Trails.

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Count this as one of the first major acquisition deals of 2021: Coinbase said on Tuesday that it is set to acquire crypto infrastructure services provider Bison Trails for an undisclosed sum.

On this episode of The Scoop, Coinbase chief product officer Surojit Chatterjee and Bison Trails CEO Joe Lallouz unpack the deal with The Block's Frank Chaparro and Ryan Todd.

"Bison trails is going to serve as a foundational product within our product portfolio: what we call our ecosystem products," Chatterjee, a former executive at Google, said.

"So staking infra services is a start point, but we are going to look at other potential services that we can externalize, that we can create as a service."

The deal represents a bigger push by Coinbase to offer its internal solutions to new client segments, Chatterjee said.

"Over time you will see we will extend additional infrastructure and API services, many of which have actually been developed to power our internal Coinbase product," he added. "We want to externalize them make them services for the entire crypto ecosystem."

In this episode of The Scoop, we explore various aspects of the deal, including:

What it could mean for Coinbase's existing staking offering
How it improves Coinbase's standing as an infrastructure as a service provider in the crypto market
How the Bison Trails team could lead to new external API services for big-ticket clients and help improve existing services
Chatterjee's product philosophy for Coinbase
Recent moves by rivals to snag banking licenses from the OCC