Is Coinbase bringing crypto ICOs back through this $375 million deal?
After years of venture-funded dominance, Coinbase is reviving the concept crypto tasks can elevate cash instantly from their customers.
The US-based change introduced on Oct. 21 that it acquired Echo, a community-fundraising platform based by veteran investor Jordan “Cobie” Fish, in a $375 million deal to rebuild fairer, on-chain capital markets.
According to the change:
“Echo believes in democratizing early-stage investing, in order that extra folks can help the subsequent era of breakthrough firms…Integrating Echo’s instruments will assist us allow extra direct neighborhood participation, becoming a member of tasks with capital, solely onchain.”
The buy positions Coinbase on the heart of a development reshaping token financing. Echo has already processed greater than $200 million throughout 300 offers, utilizing its merchandise Echo Private and Sonar, a self-hosted public-sale software.
Together, they let tasks run compliant token gross sales with out counting on centralized launchpads or opaque enterprise allocations.
Meanwhile, Echo will stay a standalone model, however Coinbase plans to fold its infrastructure right into a full-stack pipeline spanning its change and Base layer-2 network. This means the fundraising platform’s software of launch, fundraising, and secondary buying and selling could be absolutely built-in into the Coinbase platform.
Coinbase says the mixing will finally lengthen past crypto tokens to tokenized securities and real-world belongings (RWAs).
From ICO Bust to Regulated Launchpads
Coinbase’s acquisition inevitably remembers the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) growth of 2017 and 2018, when startups reportedly raised round $20 billion globally earlier than the bubble collapsed underneath regulatory stress.
However, a five-year freeze in public token gross sales adopted as personal enterprise rounds took over.
Now, with clearer guidelines bobbing up globally, together with the United States, Europe’s MiCA framework, Singapore’s licensing regime, and KYC-based launchpads, public fundraising is resurfacing in a managed type.
According to Tiger Research, compliant launchpads have generated a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} in 2025, with tasks like Plasma’s XPL token utilizing Echo’s Sonar system to shut oversubscribed gross sales.
Coinbase’s Echo acquisition alerts a bid to institutionalize that momentum. By routing early-stage choices through its regulated change, the publicly-listed agency can expose vetted tasks to 110 million verified customers whereas giving retail buyers a authorized path into offers as soon as restricted to VCs.
A return to the group however to not 2017
Whether this marks the return of ICO-style hypothesis is much less sure.
Analysts at Tiger Research see at the moment’s surroundings as structurally completely different as a result of compliance is stricter, yields are decrease, and data asymmetry is narrower.
According to the agency, launchpads corresponding to Buidlpad in Korea present sturdy short-term efficiency, however common token good points have settled under 5×, a far cry from 2017’s 100× rallies.
At the identical time, Blockworks Researcher Carlos said:
“The present ICO panorama navigates a tradeoff between high hostile choice (dangerous founders) & capital formation maturity (high valuations).”
Still, demand for clear, on-chain fundraising stays high. Echo’s mannequin of screened members, verifiable smart-contract funding, and open cap tables gives a regulated framework for retail inclusion.
Tiger Research said:
“Public launchpads present renewed entry to ‘early funding alternatives’ that remained closed for a while. They provide particular person buyers excluded from enterprise capital-centered market buildings a path to take part in early-stage tasks through fairer and extra clear strategies.”
If profitable, Coinbase’s guess might bridge two eras of crypto finance: the speculative crowdsales that ignited public curiosity and the regulated token markets now rising underneath world oversight.
In the method, the change might show that neighborhood capital formation, as soon as dismissed as a relic of the wild-west cycle, nonetheless has a future on Wall Street rails.
However, Tiger Research cautioned that vital challenges persist. The agency defined that open participation and selective effectivity inherently battle, making it troublesome to stability inclusivity with high quality management.
It famous:
“Overly clear standards invite system exploitation. Opaque standards weaken belief.”
Considering this, Tiger Research added that putting that stability would require additional institutional and technical refinement because the business matures.
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