Bahamian cryptocurrency exchange FTX was in news lately after reports emerged of a potential takeover of Robinhood Markets. According to people familiar with the matter, FTX was in discussions to acquire Robinhood.
Bloomberg later clarified that the derivatives platform has not extended Robinhood with a buyout proposal and could still decide against pursuing any kind of deal.
In a follow-up statement to Bloomberg, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried stated that his firm is excited about potentially collaborating with Robinhood but that there were no active merger conversations, as mentioned in previous reports.
“We are excited about Robinhood’s business prospects and potential ways we could partner with them, and I have always been impressed by the business that Vlad and his team have built,” Bankman-Fried said. “That being said there are no active M&A conversations with Robinhood.”
Robinhood declined to comment.
FTX is one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world and offers derivatives products as well as spot trading. The firm has become a rival to Coinbase and Binance, though it doesn’t offer its services in the U.S.
FTX On The Move
In recent weeks, Bankman-Fried’s firm signed deals to bail out embattled crypto players. It had lend a helping hand crypto lender BlockFi by providing $250 million credit facility. Alameda, his quantitative trading firm, also committed $500 million in financing to Voyager Digital, a crypto brokerage.
Despite mass layoffs in the crypto exchange business, SBF-led firm confirmed earlier this month that it not be slashing jobs. Bankman-Fried tweeted on June 6 that his trading platform plans to “keep growing” for the foreseeable future.
With respect to Robinhood, the popular trading platform that introduced millions of traders to Bitcoin [BTC], Ether [ETH] and Dogecoin [DOGE] came under pressure this year as trading volumes ease from 2021’s frenzy.
Those were times when retail investors were rushing to pump money into shares of so-called meme stocks such as GameStop and AMC Entertainment.
But since its 2021 debut in NASDAQ, the discount brokerage platform has shed roughly three-quarters of its value and its current share price has too depleted form its initial public offering.
That said, Last fall, Robinhood announced it was testing a crypto wallet and revealed that the waitlist for it had reached 1 million customers.