Voyager Digital, a crypto brokerage firm co-founded by a former CTO of Uber, is acquiring crypto wallet startup Ethos, an announcement published by Voyager on Feb. 27 reveals.
This acquisition is building on a strategic partnership between Ethos and Voyager, which was first announced in September last year. According to the announcement, the Ethos Universal Wallet software, first released in July 2018, will be integrated into Voyager’s retail and institutional businesses enabling self-custody integrated with a brokerage solution.
With the acquisition, Voyager will also obtain access to Ethos Bedrock, an enterprise blockchain application. With Bedrock, the company reportedly hopes to strengthen its institutional offering and allow businesses of any kind to build blockchain-enabled applications in the custody, payments and investments spaces.
Shingo Lavine, founder and CEO of Ethos, will reportedly join Voyager as chief blockchain officer. Crypto outlet Coindesk reports that Voyager will pay for the acquisition with 7 million of its shares, which are quoted at CA$0.77 ($.66) at press time. This translates to an acquisition price of about CA$5.39 million (a little over $4 million).
The acquisition is expected to take place at the end of March and the price will not be paid fully upfront, as 3.3 million shares will reportedly be handed over immediately and 1 million held in escrow and released over two years, while 2.6 million will be withheld for 24 months. Coindesk writes that Voyager will also reportedly gain some Ethos tokens, which were issued in its initial coin offering (ICO) in July 2017 — when the company was known as Bituence — raising nearly $1.7 million.
As Cointelegraph recently reported, Voyager has gone public on Canada’s TSX Venture Exchange following the completion of a so-called reverse takeover.