The San Francisco-based blockchain company, Ripple has taken an undisclosed minority stake in the cryptocurrency exchange, Bitstamp in the first quarter of this year, according to the latest transcript of Galaxy Digital’s shareholder conference call.

Ripple Buys Bitstamp Stake

Ripple acquired the stakes from Pantera Capital, a US-based digital asset investment firm, and Galaxy Digital advised on the deal.

“On the back of a record year for our investment banking team, we advised Pantera, a leading blockchain asset management firm on the sale of its stake in European digital asset exchange Bitstamp to Ripple Labs in Q1,” the meeting’s transcript noted.

“Executing on a deal with this complexity, post-FTX, reinforces our position as a leading investment bank for digital assets with unparalleled sector knowledge and execution acumen, and the investment banking teams pipeline remains strong with a dozen active mandates being pursued right now by the team.”

Note that Bitstamp did put EUR on the XRPL in January. So Pantera sold Bitstamp equity to Ripple.
Were there other suitors or did Pantera know Ripple wanted Bitstamp? Why did they know that? Seems a lot of backroom negotiating involved; relationships.https://t.co/SaqgJDrjSHhttps://t.co/lprO2A4bc1

— WrathofKahneman (@WKahneman) May 24, 2023

A Strategic Investment?

Bitstamp is one of the oldest cryptocurrency trading venues, established in 2011. Headquartered in Luxembourg, it is one of the top ten sport crypto exchanges and handled $171 million in trading volumes in the past 24 hours, as seen on Coinmarketcap.com.

In addition, it is one of the top platforms to trade XRP tokens, the native cryptocurrency of Ripple. XRP is the second most-traded cryptocurrency on Bitstamp, following Bitcoin. On top of that, it is the second-largest XRP market, only behind Binance, the largest crypto exchange in terms of trading volume.

Pantera invested $10 million in Bitstamp in 2014. It remained the largest shareholder in Bitstamp until 2018, when acquired by Belgium-based investment firm NXMH acquired the crypto exchange in an all-cash deal at a valuation of $60 million. Moreover, Pantera sold its stake in Bitstamp to NXMH earlier.

Neither Ripple nor Pantera did not disclose the closed deal officially. Also, the financial terms of the Bitstamp deal remain unknown.

Meanwhile, Bitstamp continues its expansion efforts within Europe and obtained registration in Spain and Italy last year. Furthermore, the exchange appointed JB Graftieaux as the CEO last May and made a few other management changes.

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