After years of venture-funded dominance, Coinbase is reviving the idea that crypto projects can raise money directly from their users.

The US-based exchange announced on Oct. 21 that it acquired Echo, a community-fundraising platform founded by veteran investor Jordan “Cobie” Fish, in a $375 million deal to rebuild fairer, on-chain capital markets.

According to the exchange:

“Echo believes in democratizing early-stage investing, so that more people can support the next generation of breakthrough companies…Integrating Echo’s tools will help us enable more direct community participation, joining projects with capital, entirely onchain.”

The purchase positions Coinbase at the center of a trend reshaping token financing. Echo has already processed more than $200 million across 300 deals, using its products Echo Private and Sonar, a self-hosted public-sale tool.

Together, they let projects run compliant token sales without relying on centralized launchpads or opaque venture allocations.

Meanwhile, Echo will remain a standalone brand, but Coinbase plans to fold its infrastructure into a full-stack pipeline spanning its exchange and Base layer-2 network. This means the fundraising platform’s tool of launch, fundraising, and secondary trading would be fully integrated into the Coinbase platform.

Coinbase says the integration will eventually extend beyond crypto tokens to tokenized securities and real-world assets (RWAs).

From ICO Bust to Regulated Launchpads

Coinbase’s acquisition inevitably recalls the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) boom of 2017 and 2018, when startups reportedly raised around $20 billion globally before the bubble collapsed under regulatory pressure.

However, a five-year freeze in public token sales followed as private venture rounds took over.

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Author: Oluwapelumi Adejumo