Blockchain.com, one of the first blockchain focussed companies to be launched, way back in 2011 has announced that it is acquiring the assets and business of AiX, which is a company that has built an AI-powered negotiation and matching engine for institutional OTC traders.
Blockchain.com said that it valued the products built by AiX and also the knowledge that the members of AiX bring to the table. The AiX CEO, Jos Evans has spent over 15 years trading and broking in derivatives markets while its COO, Taylor Cable also has over 15 years of experience in the financial markets and these are likely to be big assets for a growing company like Blockchain.com in a field that currently seems to have endless possibilities.
Blockchain.com recently raised their Series C from partners of DST Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners and VY Capital which pushed their valuation to over $5 billion. At that time, the company had decided to use the funds to aggresively grow on its range of products and this acquisition seems to be a part of that strategy.
The CEO of blockchain.com, Peter Smith, also added that they hoped that this acquisition of the product, user base and knowledge from AiX would help them in their vision to grow their customer base and would help them to continue to focus on increasing their contribution in the blockchain industry.
Blockchain.com is a highly profitable company and with the sudden boom in the interest surrounding crypto among the retail traders and institutional investors, it has been able to surpass much of its earnings in 2020 within the first couple of month of 2021. AiX has a very strong product as it uses AI to help traders meet the financial markets and with the 2 of these companies coming together know, it could be right to believe that a crypto exchange and clearing desk focussed on institutional investors is on the anvil as far as blockchain.com is concerned.
Last year, blockchain.com had launched an API for algo trading which was focussed on cryptocurrency traders. It was launched so as to give these traders access to some deep liquidity at a very high speed as well. Their acquisition of AiX also seems to be tuned towards this same goal which should be good news for high frequency algo traders who are constantly looking for better tools to beat the markets. It remains to be seen how far they are willing to take their suite of products in terms of technology and what benefits it can give to its users.
