CoinDesk Acquires TradeBlock, Adding Indexes and Pricing to News, Events Offerings

Cryptocurrency media and events platform CoinDesk, which owns this news service, announced Tuesday it purchased TradeBlock, the world’s leading crypto index provider.

With the purchase, CoinDesk said it’s positioned to be the leading source of crypto news, information and data for the rapidly growing sector, which has seen a flood of interest and investment from financial companies. In the year just closed, the price of bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency, rose more than 300%, driven largely by institutional investors.

”We will be crypto investors’ go-to destination for unified media, events, research, pricing and data,” Kevin Worth, CoinDesk CEO, said in a statement. 

Financial terms of the transaction weren't disclosed.

The entire TradeBlock team will remain with the company, which will operate independently from the media operations to maintain TradeBlock’s commitment to data security and confidentiality and the integrity of CoinDesk’s journalism, the media company said.

More than $20 billion of investment products use TradeBlock indexes and billion of dollars in monthly trading volume is quoted against them, CoinDesk said. The biggest user of TradeBlock’s XBX index is Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, the largest publicly traded crypto financial product, the media company said. Grayscale is owned by Digital Currency Group, the parent company of CoinDesk. DCG previously held a minority stake in TradeBlock.

Michael Casey, CoinDesk's chief content officer, wrote in a blog post on Medium that the deal fits within a long tradition of news organizations serving as guardians and curators of crucial financial indexes, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Financial Times' FTSE 100 and Nikkei's Nikkei 225.

"Such outlets are ideally placed to foster trust in the integrity of the numbers," Casey wrote. "Wall Street is coming. It will demand reliable prices."