Cryptocurrency data analytics platform CoinGecko has made its first acquisition in the NFT data analytics space with the purchase of Zash, making waves in the public eye. In an announcement made on November 22nd, the company revealed that the CoinGecko team plans to integrate the NFT data provided by Zash into their platform by the second quarter of next year.
CoinGecko Makes a Noteworthy Move
The terms of the deal were not disclosed in the public announcement, but the CoinGecko team stated that Web3 Studios served as the financial advisor for this acquisition. Zash was founded at Entrepreneur First, a European startup accelerator supported by expert entrepreneurs in the field such as Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and John Collison, co-founder of Stripe.
Zash was initially designed as a social investment application “verified with real blockchain and trader data”, but later shifted its focus to the NFT data field due to the lack of reliable and accurate blockchain data for NFTs. Zash currently offers NFT data from 87 marketplaces in various blockchain ecosystems, including Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Bitcoin Ordinals. TM Lee, co-founder and CEO of CoinGecko, stated the following:
“After evaluating all existing NFT data providers in the NFT market, Zash stands out as a unique platform. They have created an exceptional product with the most comprehensive NFT data coverage in the market within 3 years and caught the attention of top-tier clients with a lean team.”
Details of the Deal Not Disclosed
As part of the acquisition, the Zash team will join CoinGecko. Bobby Ong, co-founder and COO of CoinGecko, declined to disclose the number of team members in Zash, but according to LinkedIn, Zash has 10 members.
Ong also refrained from commenting on the size of the deal, but according to Crunchbase data, Zash was at the pre-seed funding round level when it raised an undisclosed amount from investors including Cogitent Ventures and WWVentures in February of this year.
CoinGecko was founded in 2014 and continues to compete with companies like CoinMarketCap, which was acquired by Binance for approximately $400 million in 2020.
