Cryptocurrency platform Coinbase has acquired Earn.com, a portal that allows people to make money by answering emails or completing other tasks, and it has hired Earn's co-founder and CEO, Balaji Srinivasan, as its first chief technology officer (CTO).
In a blogpost about the acquisition, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, said that Srinivasan has become one of the most respected technologists in the crypto field and is considered "one of the technology industry’s few true originalists."
Before serving as the CEO at Earn.com, Srinivasan was a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Srinivasan holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University.
"As CTO of Coinbase, Balaji will serve an important role as the technological evangelist for the company. Balaji will evangelize for both crypto and for Coinbase, educating the world and recruiting crypto-first talent to the company," Armstrong said in the post.
Neither Earn.com nor Coinbase has revealed the value of the deal, but reports say it is around the $100 million mark. As per a Recode report, Coinbase is paying for the company with some cash, stock, and some crypto assets.
Coinbase has also been expanding its operations rapidly. On April 13, the company announced the acquisition of Cipher Browser, a mobile app browser and wallet. Earlier this month, the company also announced the setup of Coinbase Ventures, an early-stage venture fund aimed at cryptocurrency startups.
Earn.com was founded in 2013 as a a hardware maker for bitcoin mining, and in 2017 it rebranded itself as a social network. As per its website, "Earn.com allows you to pay people to reply to mass emails, with 30-60% response rates in 24 hours."
Srinivasan was one of the initial co-founder, but he stepped back from daily operations to take on a full-time role with Andreessen Horowitz. He returned to Earn.com as CEO in 2015.
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