UPDATED 14:54 EDT / AUGUST 18 2014

Coinbase grows Bitcoin talent and tools with acquisition of Blockr.io

Coinbase_Logo_2013Coinbase, Bitcoin wallet and merchant payment processing company, just publicized another talent acquisition today with the announcement of the buy of blockchain explorer Blockr.io.

As part of the acquisition two talented engineers from Blockr.io will join the Coinbase team: software engineer Sašo Matejina and designer Samo Drole. The two engineers will be working to extend the Coinbase API (and by extension developer tools) and work on building out Coinbase’s own Bitcoin node.

“We primarily wanted it because they were really talented,” said Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. The acquisition is cited as one to pull in the talent more so than the product.

Blockr.io is a popular blockchain explorer, which allows people to search and visualize the public ledger of all bitcoin transactions.

As a block explorer and charting service, Blockr.io provides an intuitive view of current activity on the bitcoin network with a sleek UI. This includes current bitcoin trade prices across several bitcoin exchanges and a search engine that allows visitors to view information from the Bitcoin blockchain based on block height, Bitcoin address, block hash, and transaction hash.

This acquisition by Coinbase builds on the continuing expansion of developer-outreach by Bitcoin-related companies, especially in terms of releasing APIs. In June, Coinsetter opened up an API for developers and charting services to draw information about trades; and in July the Winklevoss Bitcoin Index also released an API for accessing its historical data.

Perhaps an update to Coinbase’s API will lead to the site being listed on BitcoinAverage, a weighted global bitcoin price index, where Coinbase has been excluded for some time for not publishing trade volume data.

Blockr.io also includes block views and charts for altcoins such as Litecoin, Digitalcoin, Quark, Peercoin and Megacoin.

Armstrong says that Blockr.io will operate as normal as the two engineers transition to working with the company. It is unclear, however, what the long term plans may be, which made include rebranding Blockr.io under Coinbase.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU