Bitpanda Acquires FCA-Approved Crypto Custodian Trustology
- Trustology, which will be rebranded to Bitpanda Custody, is Bitpanda’s maiden acquisition worth tens of millions of dollars.
- Bitpanda plans to begin its newly announced crypto custody services by taking custody of all its assets across its retail and institutional businesses.
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Austria-based crypto exchange Bitpanda has made its first acquisition in the form of crypto and DeFi custodian Trustology with the goal of boosting its offerings, the company said in a press release on 22 February.
According to the announcement, the acquisition will help Bitpanda pave the way for its Pro service — which caters to experienced traders and institutional investors — to launch its own custody service. Even though Bitpanda was founded in 2014, Trustology — which will now be rebranded as Bitpanda Custody — is its first acquisition. The CEO and founder of Bitpanda, Eric Demuth, said on Twitter:
“With the Trustology team joining us to create Bitpanda Custody we will bring world-class institutional-grade security to all Bitpanda users for free, plus lots of new products and services will come out of it as well. Welcome to the team!”
The acquisition of Trustology will help Bitpanda offer digital asset custody services across the U.K., as the platform had already registered as a crypto-assets firm with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) back in October 2021. Bitpanda also claimed that it would become the largest crypto custodian once it has transferred all of its assets across its retail and institutional businesses to Bitpanda Custody.
While not much detail was revealed around the terms of the deal, it has become known that Bitpanda had to pay tens of millions of dollars to acquire Trustology. The maiden acquisition, however, came after a series of fundraising rounds throughout 2021, which brought Bitpanda around $450 million in funding and raised its valuation to $4.1 billion.
- Germany’s largest bank will use Taurus’ custody and tokenization technology to manage the cryptocurrencies, tokenized assets, and digital assets of its clients.
- Deutsche Bank was one of a few companies to participate in Taurus’ $65 million Series B fundraising round back in February, which was led by Credit Suisse.
Deutsche Bank headquarters in Beijing, China on April 3, 2019. Shutterstock
- Acquiring a majority stake in the GOPAX crypto exchange will allow Binance to re-enter the South Korean market, two years after it left.
- The funds for the acquisition came from Binance’s Industry Recovery Initiative, and will be used to enable customer withdrawals and interest payments on GOPAX.
- Bankrupt crypto lender Voyager Digital has received an initial approval from the bankruptcy court to sell its assets to Binance.US for a little over $1 billion.
- The deal, however, still requires approval from a majority of Voyager’s creditors, and is subject to another confirmation hearing scheduled for March.