Coinbase to Buy Crypto Options Exchange Deribit for $2.9 Billion

Coinbase announced it has agreed to buy Deribit, the world’s biggest crypto options exchange, for $2.9 billion, the biggest merger deal ever in the crypto industry.

The deal will allow Coinbase to fill a missing piece in its derivatives business and push deeper into areas long dominated by big offshore exchanges. Unlike Binance and OKX, Coinbase doesn’t offer crypto options trading yet. It has a small but growing derivatives business, launched in 2023, that offers crypto futures.

Deribit, founded in 2016 and headquartered in Dubai, processed $1 trillion in trades last year. It’s popular among big market makers such as Galaxy Digital, GSR, and Akuna Capital. In the U.S., CME also offers bitcoin and ether options. Coinbase will pay $700 million in cash and 11 million shares for the transaction, which is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to regulatory approvals. The transaction price is lower than the $4 billion to $5 billion valuation that Deribit might be fetching as reported by Bloomberg in January.

Crypto M&A has been heating up amid a favorable regulatory environment under President Donald Trump. Last week, Kraken completed its $1.5 billion acquisition of U.S. retail futures trading platform NinjaTrader, the second biggest crypto deal ever. Stripe closed its acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure firm, for $1.1 billion in February.

Later Thursday, Coinbase reported first-quarter revenue of $2 billion, down 10% from a quarter ago, due to lower trading revenue. Net income for the quarter was $66 million, down from $1.3 billion a quarter ago, driven by unrealized loss of $597 million on its crypto asset investment portfolio. During the first quarter, Coinbase purchased $153 million crypto assets for its corporate investment portfolio, primarily in bitcoin.