 Arca, Blocktower to merge into unified crypto platform 
2024-11-14

Arca and BlockTower Capital agreed to merge into a unified cryptocurrency investment platform, according to a Nov. 13 announcement. 
“Investors have been clamoring for regulated digital assets investment offerings for years,” Rayne Steinberg, Arca’s CEO said in a statement. 
The merger will help ensure the firms possess “the resources and expertise to effectively manage our current product offerings and broaden our investment options,” Steinberg added.
Arca and Blocktower are both registered investment advisors in the United States. BlockTower’s venture capital arm, BlockTower Venture Capital, will continue to operate independantly, the firms said. 
“Competing in the maturing digital assets space and serving our investors requires a constant fight for top talent. By merging with Arca, we’re excited to create a stronger investment team immediately,” Ari Paul, BlockTower’s Chief Investment Officer, said in a statement.
In May, Blocktower Capital reportedly suffered losses after an exploit drained a portion of the firm’s cryptocurrency holdings. It managed around $1.7 billion at the time of the hack, according to Bloomberg.
Merger activity is heating up in Web3 as companies scramble to expand operations and add additional capabilities. 
On Nov. 13, Coinbase has bought Utopia Labs in a bid to build out the cryptocurrency exchange’s on-chain payments infrastructure, Coinbase said on Nov. 13.
Utopia Labs’ team will join Base, Coinbase’s layer 2 scaling network, “to help accelerate our onchain payments roadmap within Coinbase Wallet,” Coinbase said in a blog post.
“There’s a natural flywheel here: Base is supporting developers who build onchain apps, those apps attract users onchain, Wallet onboards those users, and in turn more users incentivizes more developers to build onchain,” Coinbase said.
In October, payment giant Stripe acquired stablecoin platform Bridge in a $1.1 billion deal, in a bid to deliver on an earlier promise to add support for stablecoin payments.
On July 9, DeFi Technologies agreed to buy trading desk Stillman Digital in an all-stock deal that analysts say will transform the Canadian crypto platform into “a smaller version of Galaxy Digital.” 
The acquisition reflected the need for crypto platforms to pursue scale “so they can use size and diversification to better navigate the industry’s significant momentum swings and the increasing competition in many of its sub-verticals,” Mark Palmer, an equities analyst at Benchmark, said in July.